Brad Pitt reportedly set to star in Quentin Tarantino’s final film

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After previously working together on 2009’s Inglourious Basterds and 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Brad Pitt and director Quentin Tarantino are reportedly set to reunite for The Movie Critic, the flimmaker’s 10th and final film.

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According to Deadline, which first reported the news, Pitt, 60, may be playing the title role in the film.

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Sources go on to tell The Hollywood Reporter that if Pitt signs on, filming would likely take place later this year or early 2025 as the Oscar winner is expected to be tied up shooting his Formula One racing feature with director Joseph Kosinski for much of 2024.

After starting his career in 1992 with Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino has long maintained that he will only direct 10 feature films.

In 2016, Tarantino, 60, emphatically confirmed he would retire after he finished his 10th film.

“I’m planning on stopping at 10. So it’ll be two more,” Tarantino said from the stage of the 2016 Jerusalem Film Festival.

In 2012, he told Playboy [per USA Today], “I want to stop at a certain point. Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually, the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film f***s up three good ones. I don’t want that bad, out-of-touch comedy in my filmography, the movie that makes people think, ‘Oh man, he still thinks it’s 20 years ago.’ When directors get out-of-date, it’s not pretty.”

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“I don’t believe you should stay onstage until people are begging you to get off,” Tarantino added in an interview with Deadline in 2014. “I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more.”

In November 2022, Tarantino confirmed in an interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace that his next movie would be his last.

“I’ve been doing it for a long time; I’ve been doing it for 30 years. And it’s time to wrap up the show,” Tarantino told Wallace, 75. “I’m an entertainer. I want to leave you wanting more.”

After flirting with several different ideas, including directing a Star Trek film he wrote, Tarantino revealed last May that his final feature is inspired by a journalist who covered film for a porno magazine in the 1970s.

“(It) is based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag,” Tarantino told Deadline at the Cannes Film Festival.

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“He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. 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 De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver) might be if he were a film critic.”

He also shared more information on his real-life inspiration for The Movie Critic.

“He wrote like he was 55 but he was only in his early to mid-30s. He died in his late thirties. It wasn’t clear for a while but now I’ve done some more research and I think it was complications due to alcoholism … the porno rag critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his s*** was really funny. He was as rude as hell.”

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The idea hearkens back to one of Tarantino’s earliest jobs, in which he loaded porn magazines into a vending machine. “All the other stuff was too skanky to read, but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page,” he said.

In his conversation with Wallace, Tarantino said The Movie Critic will be his final statement as a filmmaker because he doesn’t want to be “this old man who’s out of touch.”

“I’m feeling a bit like an old man out of touch when it comes to the current movies that are out right now,” he said.

“And that’s what happens — that’s exactly what happens,”

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X: @markhdaniell

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