Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt are reportedly gearing up to work together one last time.
According to Deadline, the actor is in talks to star in the director’s final film, The Movie Critic. It’ll be the duo’s third time working together after Pitt starred in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds in 2009 and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2019, the latter of which earned Pitt his first and only Academy Award.
Although Pitt’s role in The Movie Critic is still in the air, it is clear that filming for the project will have to begin either late this year or in early 2025 since the 60-year-old is currently working on a Joseph Kosinski-directed Formula One racing feature for Apple for the rest of the year.
360aproko has reached out to Pitt and Tarantino’s representatives for confirmation.
Pitt also appeared in the 1993 feature True Romance, which Tarantino wrote but was directed by Tony Scott.
The casting is the first time The Movie Critic has had a face attached to it — the film doesn’t even have a studio attached yet. All that is known of the film is that it’s expected to be based on a real-life film critic whom Tarantino admires. In May 2023, Tarantino told Deadline that the film is set in California in 1977 and “is based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.”
The director shared that he drew inspiration from a job he had as a teen, loading porn magazines into a vending machine and emptying quarters out of the cash dispenser. “All the other stuff was too skanky to read, but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page,” Tarantino told Deadline. There was one critic in particular Tarantino liked, who wrote snarky and smart as the second-string critic.
Tarantino also told the outlet that the film’s star would be a “new leading man for me” and would be around 35 years old, which would take Pitt out of the running for the lead if still true.
The Kill Bill director has talked about retirement for many years, often saying that he plans to retire from directing movies after his 10th film in order to maintain a consistently high quality in his filmography.
If Tarantino holds true to his vow, The Movie Critic will be his final film by virtue of it being his 10th, since he considers the two-part Kill Bill saga to be a single movie. After he retires, Tarantino has said he could direct television and continue writing books, which he’s done before with a novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, published in 2021, and a film criticism book, Cinema Speculation, published in 2022.
