Tarantino Wrote His Tenth Film, Then Chose the Pause

Quentin Tarantino has a finished script for his tenth film and no date to shoot it. He said so on The Graham Norton Show on October 16, then put a London play, family time, and a long pause in front of any cameras.

He has spent years promising to stop at ten features. The vow once made the next movie feel like an ending. It now gives him a clean reason to wait, while other Tarantino pages keep reaching the public without using up that last slot.

A Finished Tenth Script Has No Start Date

Tarantino, 63, still counts Kill Bill’s two volumes as one film, which leaves him on nine directed features. The last of those, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, came out in 2019. Seven years later he is busier on paper than he is on a set.

He has dumped one planned finale, turned another screenplay into a stage farce, and licensed a Cliff Booth story to David Fincher so it does not count. On Norton’s sofa he added a new script he likes, then refused to put a year on it. The countdown that was meant to close the career is doing the opposite job. It keeps the last movie unmade, and it keeps every other project in its glow.

THE TARANTINO PIPELINE THROUGH 2027

Read across that list and the pattern is blunt. The work he will not direct still moves. The film that would close the books does not.

What He Told Graham Norton About the Last Movie

The October 16 taping was his first Graham Norton Show appearance in more than a decade. He sat with Ellen DeGeneres, Colin Farrell, and Gemma Chan, and he was there to sell a play. Norton asked about the tenth film, the final one, and whether it was written.

“Maybe,” Tarantino said, before he stopped joking. The fuller answer is the one that will follow him for months.

I’ve written a script that I could do that I really, really like, but I have to do the play and see who I am. I’ll finish the play and then I’ll go back, be with my family for a while, and then live, and then let’s see what that guy wants to do.

Quentin Tarantino, The Graham Norton Show, October 16, 2026

Other transcripts render the last beat as “live a little.” Either way, the order is fixed. The play comes first. Home comes next. The tenth film is a decision for a later version of himself, not a job on a call sheet.

Norton also needled him about The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, the Brad Pitt spin-off Tarantino wrote and Fincher directed. That is how Tarantino stays in cinemas without spending the tenth slot. He called the move a “slippery greasy pig loophole.”

He did not name the new script, and he did not sketch a plot. He left the door open that the next directed film is still meant to be the last. He also left open the chance that, after London and a stretch of ordinary life, “that guy” may want something else.

London Gets the Swashbuckler He First Wrote as a Film

The Popinjay Cavalier is the project that ate a movie. Tarantino told Norton he had wanted to write a play for a while, began the idea as a screenplay, then saw that the pages worked on a stage. “This could be the one,” he said. He is “very happy with the results.”

Sacha Baron Cohen stars as Rupert Sebastian Thomas Jr., billed as the world’s greatest actor. The story sits in 1830s Europe. Tarantino called it a jump from the swashbuckling movie genre with a French farce quality, and he asked to keep the plot “a little under wraps.” Producers Sonia Friedman Productions and Sony Pictures Entertainment describe a comedy of deception and disguise, with acrobatics, swordplay, and music by Tim Phillips. Scenic and costume design is by Tom Pye. Philip d’Orleans is fight director.

Cohen said he accepted before Tarantino got through his first curse, and joked that they would lose their West End virginity together. Tarantino’s own line was drier: “I’m keen with anticipation to give the West End a great night out.”

THE PHOENIX THEATRE RUN

• Previews: February 23, 2027, at the Phoenix Theatre.
• Opening night: March 18, 2027.
• Last booked date: June 13, 2027.
• Prices: tickets from £25, with more than 16,000 seats under £50.
• Lead: Cohen as Rupert Sebastian Thomas Jr.; further casting still to come.

The Phoenix Theatre booking calendar is already live. Tom Rothman, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Motion Picture Group, and Sonia Friedman said it was a joy to watch Tarantino in a rehearsal room with actors, fencers, acrobats, and musicians. That is the year ahead of him, not a film unit.

He has already said the play could take a year and a half to two years of his life if it works and a tour follows, and that a flop would end the job quickly. Either result still sits in front of a tenth feature.

He Already Walked Away From One Finished Finale

Liking a script has not been enough. In April 2024 he abandoned The Movie Critic, the 1977-set story that had been sold as film ten. Brad Pitt had been in the mix. Sony had been close. Robert Richardson, the cinematographer on six Tarantino features, had even left Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic after Tarantino asked Fuqua to release him for “my last film.”

A month later Tarantino rang Richardson again. He was not going to make it. He had written something new. That replacement, Richardson said, is more or less the Cliff Booth picture Fincher is now finishing.

On the Church of Tarantino podcast in 2025, the director gave the creative reason. The Movie Critic asked him to turn Los Angeles into an older city without CGI, the same trick he had already solved on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “It was too much like the last one.” He also waved off the idea that he was frozen by legacy talk. He said he was not paralyzed with fear.

So the bar for film ten is not a stack of pages. It is a problem he has not already solved. A script he “really, really likes” failed that test once. The new one has not been put through it yet, because he will not stage the test until after London.

Robert Richardson Still Talks About a Summer Shoot

In early July, at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Richardson still spoke as if a reunion were coming. “The intention is to work with [Tarantino] again,” he said. He also said nobody, including him, knows what the tenth film is.

The timing he offered was already soft. Tarantino would not talk about where he was going. It could be prepped in the summer of 2027. “The exact time isn’t locked. It could be prepped in the summer, it depends on how the play does and where it goes.” Richardson called the next chapter “a very fresh Quentin,” away from The Movie Critic and away from the Hollywood sequel.

That summer window assumed the play would let go of him on schedule. Norton’s answer adds another step after closing night: go home, be with the family, live a little, then ask the man who comes back what he wants. If Tarantino keeps that sequence, Richardson’s summer is the optimistic version of the calendar, not the one the director just described on British television.

Richardson has already paid for earlier U-turns. He said the collapsed Movie Critic plan and a delayed Cliff Booth shoot, tied up with Pitt’s work on F1, cost him roughly one and a half to two years. He still wants to finish the run with Tarantino. He is waiting on a play review, and now on a family pause Tarantino had not put in that interview.

Cliff Booth Ships Without Counting as Film Ten

The loophole has a release date. The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, written by Tarantino and directed by Fincher, is due in IMAX on November 25 for a two-week run, then on Netflix on December 23. Pitt returns as the stuntman, now a Hollywood fixer in 1977, eight years after the first film. Tarantino produces. He has described the budget as in the region of $200 million, the largest he has been around.

He has said he loved the script and still did not want his last directed film to walk the same ground. A sequel, even a sideways one, would have spent the tenth slot on a character he had already filmed. Handing it to Fincher lets Pitt’s Oscar-winning role continue, lets Netflix spend at a scale a last theatrical Tarantino picture might not, and leaves the tally at nine.

THE CLIFF BOOTH CALENDAR

• IMAX: November 25, 2026, two-week global run, a first for Netflix.
• Book: Tarantino’s novel on December 8, titled The Adventures of Cliff Booth, from Harper.
• Streaming: December 23, 2026, on Netflix.
• Credit: Tarantino writes and produces; Fincher directs; the film does not count as feature ten.

Harper, which published his 2021 novel of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, frames the new book as both a sequel in prose and a novelization of Fincher’s film. The titles do not match on purpose. The book is The Adventures of Cliff Booth. The movie is The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth. In the publisher’s announcement Tarantino said he could not wait for audiences to see and read the further adventures. He gets two more versions of the character, and he still has not directed since 2019.

That is the greasy pig in practice. A Tarantino story can open in IMAX in five weeks, reach shops in December, and never move the career clock he built.

After the Phoenix, He Wants Time With His Family

The family piece is not a throwaway. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, Daniella Pick, and their two children, and he has already said the play will pull him to London for a long stretch. Once the Phoenix goes dark on June 13, 2027, his own order of operations is to go home before he becomes a director again.

He has two writing Oscars, for Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained, and a public plan that treats the next job as the last. The new script exists in that shadow. It also exists in a life that now includes school runs, a first play, and a Fincher movie he can promote without standing behind the camera.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The pages: He has written a film script he says he could make and really likes.
• The order: The Popinjay Cavalier, then family time, then a decision.
• The tally: Nine directed features, with Kill Bill counted as one; Cliff Booth does not add a tenth.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The film: No title, no plot, no cast, no studio locked for the new script.
• The shoot: Richardson’s summer 2027 prep remains a possibility, not a date Tarantino has set.
• The ending: He still talks as if the next directed film will be the last, and he has left room for “that guy” to choose otherwise.

For now the tenth film is doing the only job he has assigned it. It sits on a desk while a farce is built in the West End, while Pitt’s fixer heads to IMAX, and while a novel takes the same character into shops. If he keeps the sequence he spoke on October 16, the first honest chance to ask whether he still wants a last movie comes after June 2027, and not a day sooner.