Will we ever stop talking about Quentin Tarantino’s tenth and final film? Not if the man himself has anything to do with it, because the Academy Award winning Pulp Fiction director has been discussing why he dropped The Movie Critic as his farewell film.
Speaking on The Church of Tarantino podcast he said that he abandoned the film just before pre-production because he “wasn’t really that excited” about it.
Revealing that he originally wrote The Movie Critic as an eight-part TV series, before translating it into a feature-film, Tarantino said “No one’s waiting for this thing per se. I mean, I can do it whenever I want. I mean, it’s already written. So okay, let me just not start it right now,” he went on to explain the creative process, saying “Let me try writing it as a movie and let me see if it’s better that way. And I was like, ‘Oh, okay, no, I think this is going to be a movie.’ And then it wasn’t. I pulled the plug on it, And the reason I pulled the plug…it’s a little crazy.”
Said reason came about when Tarantino challenged himself to “take the most boring profession in the world and make it an interesting movie”, and while he liked his final script for The Movie Critic, he came to the conclusion that he “wasn’t really that excited about dramatising what I wrote once we were in pre-production”.
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“Every Tarantino titled promises so much, except The Movie Critic, ” he clarified. “Who wants to see a TV show about a fucking movie critic? Who wants to see a movie called The Movie Critic? If I can actually make a movie of a TV show about somebody who watches movies interesting, that is an accomplishment.”
Tarantino also debunked the idea that David Fincher’s in-production Netflix sorta-sequel The Adventures of Cliff Booth is what his film was going to be. He said of the Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood follow-up that it was a spiritual sequel “in so far as they take place in the same world and they take place in the same town. But there were no crossover characters. Cliff Booth was never in The Movie Critic. That’s all a bunch of bullshit. That never was the case ever, ever, ever.”
So there.
Let us know if you’re excited about The Adventures of Cliff Booth and whether you’d have liked to have seen The Movie Critic by heading to our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Originally published August 16, 2025. Updated August 19, 2025.
