Director Quentin Tarantino's Canceled Final Movie Could've Built A Meta Cinematic Universe

It is apparently official: Quentin Tarantino's 10th and final film will not be "The Movie Critic." I say "apparently" because Tarantino briefly abandoned "The Hateful Eight" when the screenplay leaked to the internet (hardly a rarity for the filmmaker, but he was decidedly not happy with the version of the script that got out), so maybe "The Movie Critic" still has a shot at going before a camera. But this feels final. It sounds like the concept got away from him, and he would've done the one thing he's talked about but avoided his entire career: he was going to make a sequel.

If The Hollywood Reporter has their story straight (and with a shared byline from Borys Kit, Pamela McClintock, and James Hibbard, I am fairly certain they're on point), "The Movie Critic" began life as a 1970s character study that was, in Tarantino's words, "based on a guy who really lived but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag" before expanding into a Hollywood yarn that involved Brad Pitt's Hollywood stuntman Cliff Booth from "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood." We know that Tarantino received permission from Paul Schrader to restage sequences from "Rolling Thunder" (the 1977 cult classic he wrote for director John Flynn), and it appeared that he was going to create an alternate Hollywood universe that consisted of reconfigured movies.

That's all off the table now. For now. I'm not so sure he's done with the idea, but he may turn it into a novel like his expanded "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." But if "The Movie Critic" is truly dead, what did we miss out on?

The Hollywood Reporter story is frustratingly short on verifiable details. The idea of Tom Cruise finally teaming up with one of the best directors of his generation is floated in one sentence and then shot down in another. Pitt reprising his role as Booth seems like a real thing, and the writers of the article are emphatic that Olivia Wilde met with Tarantino about playing a fictionalized version of legendary film critic Pauline Kael (who was arguably the defining voice of 1970s New Hollywood during her tenure at The New Yorker).

Paul Walter Hauser was rumored at one point to be the favorite to play the title character, but The Hollywood Reporter story shoots this down too. There also was talk about John Travolta, Margot Robbie, and Jamie Foxx reuniting with Tarantino. Maybe this would've been his opportunity to do "The Vega Brothers" and that "Django Unchained" sequel he teased?

Evidently, according to THR, Tarantino's sudden abandonment of the project left the California Film Commission flat-footed. Again, I am not giving up on "The Movie Critic." He's been noodling on this for a while, and I find it hard to believe he'll close out his career on a "Kill Bill" sequel or his proposed "Star Trek" film. I do think he's wedded to the "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" universe, so whatever he does next will likely exist in that world.