According to Deadline, Brad Pitt will be reuniting with Quentin Tarantino for The Movie Critic. This would mark the third time that the pair have worked together, as Pitt starred in Inglourious Basterds and co-starred in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.
It’s not known if Brad Pitt will play the title character in The Movie Critic, but Deadline believes that he will. The outlet also believes that Sony Pictures will be back to distribute the new film, but nothing has been confirmed. However, it’s also possible that Tarantino, who’s carried on writing about the life and career of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton and his stuntman Cliff Booth (as iconically played by Pitt), might be having the actor reprise his Oscar-winning role.
Why do we think this? If you listen to the Video Archives podcast, you’ll know that Tarantino acts like Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth are real guys. In QT’s continuity, Booth died in the nineties, while Rick passed away just recently. The episodes of his podcasst reveal that in the eighties, Dalton made a series of action movies for Cannon Pictures called The Fireman, and that Booth directed several of the sequels for his former pal. If DiCaprio ends up signing on to be in this, we think they could be reprising their Once Upon a Time in Hollywood roles. Deadline speculates Booth will actually be the titular character in the movie, as if you’ve read the novelization QT wrote, he had the soul of a critic. So really, who knows?
As far as the plot goes, we don’t know all that much about The Movie Critic, only that it will be set in California in 1977 and will be “based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.” When Tarantino was a teenager, he had a job loading 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,” Tarantino said. “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 might be if he were a film critic.“
As far as who could star in The Movie Critic alongside Brad Pitt, I’d imagine that we’ll see more than a few Tarantino regulars pop up for the director’s final movie. In fact, a rumour emerged last fall that John Travolta might just have a role in the movie. Wouldn’t that be something? There were also rumblings that Tarantino had offered Paul Walter Hauser (Richard Jewell) a leading role in the film prior to the Hollywood strikes. With production set to kick off later this year, we should be hearing some more concrete news regarding casting.
Aside from Brad Pitt, what other past Tarantino actors are you hoping will make an appearance in The Movie Critic? Samuel L. Jackson has got to be one of them, right?