Quentin Tarantino reportedly not making ‘The Movie Critic’ his final film

Although he’s repeatedly said he was calling it a career with his tenth film, The Movie Critic, Deadline reveals Quentin Tarantino has dropped the project, which was set to start shooting in 2025.

Tarantino’s 1970s-set project was to feature Brad Pitt reprising the role that won him his first Oscar: stuntman Cliff Booth from the writer-director’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

However, after a rewrite, the trade says Tarantino “simply decided” to shelve the project.

The director and Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction screenwriter previously told Deadline The Movie Critic was to be “based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag … He wrote about mainstream movies.”

He explained, “I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle [Robert DeNiro‘s Taxi Driver character] might be if he were a film critic.”

As for why the 61-year-old is seemingly sticking to his plan to retire from movie directing at 10 films — when, for example, 93-year-old Clint Eastwood just shot Juror #2 — Tarantino told Playboy back in 2012 he’d rather go out on top.

“Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end,” he maintained, adding, “I don’t want that bad, out-of-touch comedy in my filmography.”