For almost a decade, Quentin Tarantino has warned fans that his tenth film was going to be his last as writer/director. This unorthodox strategy is designed to secure his legacy for as many generations to come our crumbling society allows, something that can’t be said of many master filmmakers whose once-perfect IMDb pages are eventually blighted by unworthy duds such as Ready Player One, Mission to Mars, Jack, and Exodus: Gods and Kings. With last year’s award-winning Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood marking film number 9 (he counts Kill Bill as one – which is a shame that we never actually saw it released as such), fans have been steadily getting nervous as to what will be his swansong. Comfortingly, none of this means that the auteur will be giving up creating, stating several times his desire to experiment in other mediums such as TV, theatre, and literature. Which brings us to today’s news…
While we already heard a while back that he’s developing a Bounty Law series for the small screen (the fictional series at the heart of Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood), we now know of something heading our way much sooner, and it’s again related to last year’s opus. Coming in 2021 is a novelisation of the film penned by QT himself, which will expand on the adventures of Rick Dalton and his stuntman bestie, the Manson-mashing Cliff Booth. As is par for the course with the movie novelisation medium, expect lots of extra stuff we didn’t get to see on screen; and who knows, maybe it will answer one of the film’s biggest mysteries – was Brad Pitt’s dashing hero also a wife-killer? Hard not to be conflicted on that one…
Perhaps most excitingly, the book will also be available as a digital audio release, and though it’s currently unannounced, we’d wager every penny in our Bad Motherfucker wallets that Tarantino will be narrating alongside some of the film’s A-listers.
Accompanying the novelisation later that year will be Cinema Speculation, a nonfiction book on ‘70s cinema by Tarantino that will incorporate reviews, essays, and, most intriguingly, several Hollywood-style “what if” musings on the influential period in movie history.
Look for the first title in QT’s exciting new two-book with HarperCollins to arrive next Summer.
As for that 10th film… we’ve got a long while to go yet if the above is anything to go by. He was hardly the fastest writer without the distraction of having to fulfill high profile literary obligations!
