On the first of April, historically April Fool’s Day, the news emerged that director David Fincher would be working with famed writer-director Quentin Tarantino to make the sequel to the latter’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
Hollywood followed fictional actor Rick Dalton (portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman Cliff Booth (for which Brad Pitt won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), detailing their misadventures through the end of the Golden Age of Hollywood and encounters with a young man called Charlie Manson.
The film was a creative triumph for Tarantino, and while some of its elements proved controversial, the director has stated in past interviews that he believes it to be his best film. He has also stated that he will only be directing 10 films in his career (if Kill Bill is looked at as one film) and that he doesn’t desire to make his final film a sequel. Until May of 2024, he was slated to write and direct a film entitled “The Movie Critic”, in which Brad Pitt was supposed to reprise his role as Cliff Booth, implying that Tarantino has more plans for the character, and cementing the theory that his films all exist within a shared universe. However, Tarantino scrapped the film for mostly unknown reasons, the most likely being that he wants his kids (who are young) to be able to visit the set of one of his films.
Despite the director’s claims that he will only direct 10 films (a statement to which he is holding to), he has never said anything about not writing more scripts after his 10th directorial effort. In the 90s, Tarantino sold his screenplays for True Romance and Natural Born Killers to finance Pulp Fiction, and also wrote 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn, which was helmed by Robert Rodriguez. Since then, he was focused on directing his scripts, but due to his iconic writing style, it could prove a viable career option for him when the day comes. Due to this new development, it appears that he is acknowledging that and putting a project between his previous film and Hollywood.
Brad Pitt, a two-time Tarantino collaborator, is also well-known for his work with director David Fincher, such as Se7en (1995), Fight Club (1999), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). Talks of a Cliff Booth follow-up between Pitt and Tarantino occurred, with Tarantino stating that if Pitt could find a suitable director, they could push forward with the project. Pitt brought forth Fincher, and with that emerged the news that Tarantino would write and Fincher would direct a sequel to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
“You know what, this might just be my masterpiece.” – David Fincher, eighteen months from now.
