EXCLUSIVE: Quentin Tarantino’s movies are always full of surprises, and here is one about The Movie Critic we did not expect. Deadline can reveal that Tarantino has dropped the film as his 10th and final project. He simply changed his mind, Deadline has been told.

Tarantino was going to have Brad Pitt as the principal star, which would have marked their third teaming after Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. There were rumors that many from the casts of his past films might take part, and Sony was preparing to make the film after doing such a superb job on the last one.

Word is that Tarantino had rewritten his script, which delayed the start of production. But this is his 10th and final film, and Tarantino simply decided The Movie Critic will not be it.

This is the biggest surprise to Tarantino fans since years back when Deadline revealed he had shelved The Hateful Eight after he gave a small group of actors his script and one of them shared it with their rep. Soon it had been copied and the rough draft was shared all over town and online. Tarantino felt betrayed, but he eventually returned to the project after staging a reading for charity and drawing raves for it.

As for The Movie Critic, originally planned to be his 10th and final film, Tarantino has simply had a change of heart and Deadline hears he will not be moving forward with the project. Sources close to the director said he changed his mind and is going back to the drawing board to figure out what that final movie will be.

The Movie Critic project gained a lot of momentum after the SAG-AFTRA strike ended when Deadline broke that Pitt would be joining the film, with the hope to start shooting it in 2024. Tarantino opened up a bit to Deadline’s Baz Bamigboye at Cannes in May, when the filmmaker presided over a screening of Rolling Thunder. He said at the time his movie was set in California the year of that film’s release, which was 1977, and that 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.”

The inspiration goes back to a job Tarantino had as a teen, loading porn magazines into a vending machine and emptying quarters out of the cash dispenser. “All the other stuff was too skanky to read, but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page,” he told Bamigboye. There was one critic in particular Tarantino liked, who wrote snarky and smart as the second-string critic.

Like with shelving The Hateful Eight, Tarantino has pivoted when he finds it necessary, a trait that has served him well in his career and is sure to help on whatever he does decide to do as his final film.

We will update the story when there is more to reveal.