Quentin Tarantino says ‘Kill Bill: Vol. 3’ unlikely to happen: ‘I don’t see that’

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If you’ve been holding out hopes that Quentin Tarantino will continue his Kill Bill series with a third instalment, the Oscar-winning writer-director has some bad news for you: It’s not gonna happen.

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Tarantino fans have long-hoped for a follow-up featuring Uma Thurman and her daughter Maya Hawke. But in a new interview, the filmmaker confirms that his 10th — and final — movie isn’t going to have any martial arts in it whatsoever.

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“I don’t see that. My last film is about a film critic, a male critic. And he plays in the ’70s,” Tarantino said in an interview with Dutch newspaper De Morgen, ending hopes that he still has plans for Kill Bill: Vol. 3.

In 2016, Tarantino, now 60, emphatically confirmed he would retire after he finished his 10th film.

“I’m planning on stopping at 10. So it’ll be two more,” Tarantino said from the stage of the 2016 Jerusalem Film Festival.

But the 10-and-done retirement plan had been at the back of Tarantino’s mind for over a decade.

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In 2012, he told Playboy [per USA Today], “I want to stop at a certain point. Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film f***s up three good ones. I don’t want that bad, out-of-touch comedy in my filmography, the movie that makes people think, ‘Oh man, he still thinks it’s 20 years ago.’ When directors get out-of-date, it’s not pretty.”

“I don’t believe you should stay onstage until people are begging you to get off,” Tarantino added in an interview with Deadline in 2014. “I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more. I do think directing is a young man’s game, and I like the idea of an umbilical cord connection from my first to my last movie. I’m not trying to ridicule anyone who thinks differently, but I want to go out while I’m still hard. … I like that I will leave a 10-film filmography … If I get to the 10th, do a good job and don’t screw it up, well that sounds like a good way to end the old career. If, later on, I come across a good movie, I won’t not do it just because I said I wouldn’t. But 10 and done, leaving them wanting more — that sounds right.”

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The original Kill Bill films followed a former assassin (played by Thurman) as she hunts down her ex-colleagues who massacred members of her wedding party and tried to kill her.

Way back in 2004, Tarantino told Entertainment Weekly of his plan to revisit the Kill Bill universe 15 years later after the events of the first movie with Nikki, the daughter of Vivica A. Fox’s Vernita Green, seeking revenge against Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo, aka the woman who killed her mom.

“I need at least 15 years before I do this again,” Tarantino said at the time. “I’ve already got the whole mythology: Sofie Fatale will get all of Bill’s money. She’ll raise Nikki, who’ll take on The Bride. Nikki deserves her revenge every bit as much as The Bride deserved hers.”

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In 2015, a third Kill Bill movie was still very much in the cards for Tarantino.

“I’m not committing to it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if The Bride made one more appearance before the whole thing is said and done,” he told Variety that year. “I am talking to Uma about it just a little bit. Some of the stuff that I’d written that never made it into the movie that maybe I could use.”

Last year, Thurman said Kill Bill: Vol. 3 had “been discussed over the years.”

“I can’t really tell you anything about it. I mean it has been discussed over the years. There was real thought about it happening, but very long ago. I don’t see it as immediately on the horizon,” she said during an appearance on The Jess Cagle Show.

Meanwhile, Fox revealed she was hoping Zendaya could play her daughter to close out the trilogy.

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“I was quite honoured that she would say that,” Zendaya told Empire Magazine in 2021. “Obviously she’s incredible and I’m very flattered that she would think of me. But, you know, it’s just an idea. The internet kinda takes things and runs with it.”

But this past May, Tarantino said his final film will be called The Movie Critic and shoot later this fall. It will be inspired by a journalist who wrote for a porno magazine.

“[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,” Tarantino told Deadline at the Cannes Film Festival.

“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 [Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver] might be if he were a film critic.”

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After working with Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt multiple times, Tarantino said that his leading man will be a fresh face. He also shared more information on his real-life inspiration for The Movie Critic.

“He wrote like he was 55 but he was only in his early to mid-30s. He died in his late thirties. It wasn’t clear for a while but now I’ve done some more research and I think it was complications due to alcoholism.”

mdaniell@postmedia.com

Twitter: @markhdaniell

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