Quentin Tarantino Gives Stinging Rebuke on the State of Film-Going in 2025

Quentin Tarantino. That name, like those of other top-drawer directors who have reshaped our collective pop culture landscape (looking at you here, Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Bogdanovich, Allen, Lucas and De Palma) conjures up images of startling onscreen originality and unforgettable dialogue (“Oh, I’m sorry, did I break your concentration?”). Everyone, it seems, has a favorite Tarantino flick. Over here at Vents? Though we’d like to go for the more obvious – Pulp Fiction, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Django Unchained – we gotta say that, pound for pound, you can’t do much better than the 1993 gonzo epic True Romance. The irony to that particular choice is that it was actually directed by the much-missed and lamented Tony Scott with a crackerjack, guns-a-blazin’ of a script from a still up-and-coming Tarantino. But individual mileage does vary, especially when it comes to the world of movies. The above simply illustrates in the broadest of strokes just how ingrained the Knoxville, Tennessee native has become in the world of celluloid. And, like any truly great Quentin Tarantino film can attest, the ending is everything. End the film too early and you risk leaving behind a discontent rabble who might go on to burn you in effigy (a prickly lot, those pop culture aficionados). End it too late and you’ve overstayed your welcome and all you’ll ever hear is how much better your early work was versus the new stuff. What are you gonna do, am I right?

Actually, sometime back, Quentin Tarantino had announced that he had his eyes set on retirement. So where are we on that front in 2025? Our Natural Born Killers pals over at Variety have an intriguing update, as well as a candid observation from the Jackie Brown auteur on the state of moviegoing in a landscape dominated by streaming.

 Quentin Tarantino has revealed that he is currently working on the script for a stage play and, depending on its success, he might adapt it onto the silver screen as his fabled ‘final’ movie.

Speaking with film critic extraordinaire Elvis Mitchell, Tarantino said that “If you’re wondering what I’m doing right now, I’m writing a play, and it’s going to be probably the next thing I end up doing. If it’s a fiasco I probably won’t turn it into a movie. But if it’s a smash hit? It might be my last movie.”

And speaking of movies, what does Tarantino think of the Alice in Wonderland quality of the theatrical experience as it exists in 2025? Not a lot, as it turns out: “That’s a big fucking deal pulling (a play) off, and I don’t know if I can. So here we go. That’s a challenge, a genuine challenge, but making movies? Well, what the fuck is a movie now? What — something that plays in theaters for a token release for four fucking weeks? All right, and by the second week you can watch it on television. I didn’t get into all this for diminishing returns. I mean, it was bad enough in ’97. It was bad enough in 2019, and that was the last fucking year of movies. That was a shit deal, as far as I was concerned, the fact that it’s gotten drastically worse? And that it’s just it’s a show pony exercise. Now the theatrical release, you know, and then like yeah, in two weeks, you can watch it on this [streamer] and that one. Okay. Theater? You can’t do that. It’s the final frontier.”

Theater kicked off the whole popular culture bag, acting as a direct ancestor to what would one day become the technology that gave us filmmaking. As such, it seems like poetic justice that a filmmaker of Tarantino’s stature would begin the sunset of his career on the stage, versus an Apple or Netflix movie set.