Director Quentin Tarantino wanted to create a metaverse for his 10th film featuring actors and characters from his catalog, including a 16-year-old version of himself.
According to a report from The Hollywood Reporter, this Tarantino-verse would have been set within a fictional movie theatre. The young Tarantino would have acted as the metaverse’s usher, interacting with the filmmaker’s characters and the fictional actors who played them.
The metaverse would have functioned as a fiction within a fiction, complete with the entire concept appearing in The Movie Critic as a film within a film set inside a movie theater. Unfortunately, Tarantino has gone on the record stating that The Movie Critic isn’t happening.
This isn’t the first time Tarantino’s fabled 10th movie has fallen through the cracks. He’s long maintained that he would direct 10 films and then retire. One of the early projects slated to be his final piece was set in the Kill Bill universe and, according to Tarantino, would have featured the daughter of a character slain by the protagonist of the first two films returning to exact her revenge.
Tarantino was also closely attached to a Star Trek film that was reportedly meant to be a gritty, adult-oriented take on the intellectual property. That project has been abandoned, however, reportedly because the director didn’t want to end his career on a big franchise film.
It’s unclear whether the metaverse planned for The Movie Critic will persist. There’s still no confirmation as to what Tarantino’s 10th film will be, but it’s possible that the Tarantino-verse could exist outside of the silver screen.
As Cointelegraph reported back in 2022, Tarantino has dabbled in nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and the metaverse before. He sold NFTs featuring “secrets” from his films, including uncut screenplay scenes from Pulp Fiction.
He was subsequently sued by Miramax, which claimed it had ownership over the intellectual involved. Miramax also noted in the suit that it had been working on its own Tarantino-related NFTs. The two parties eventually agreed to a settlement.
With a career spanning nearly 40 years and featuring everything from an acting cameo on the 1980s TV show Golden Girls as an Elvis impersonator to rewriting the Charles Manson murders in his alternate history tale Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2019, a Tarantino-verse for the fans could be an expansive and genre-encompassing experience.