Quentin Tarantino declares 2019 the last year of movies

Quentin Tarantino has declared cinema’s time of death: 2019. The filmmaker and film scholar does not have a rosy outlook on the future of the medium, if there even is one. Speaking at a Sundance event (via Variety), Tarantino questioned: “What the fuck is a movie now?” He went on, “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.”

Deciding “the last year of movies” was the last year he personally released a film is sort of a funny thing to do, but of course Tarantino’s experience is what informed this opinion. And he was forecasting doom even in 2019, telling Deadline at the time that “I think a lot of us making movies are facing a dark night of the soul.” He said, “I know I am, and so are a lot of us who make movies, where movies were one thing to us, and they were this one thing for a long time. We are wondering if we’ll still be doing it this way 15 years from now. And my guess is not. I don’t know what it’s going to be like 15 years from now, but I don’t think this way will be the way.”

Making and releasing a film in 2019 “was a shit deal, as far as I was concerned,” Tarantino said at Sundance, and it’s only “gotten drastically worse.” That seems like a fair assessment— streaming had already thoroughly disrupted the theatrical model, and it still hasn’t fully recovered from the pandemic and subsequent strikes (at least as far as the box office numbers are concerned). And he’s not the only Hollywood creative to make such an observation. Multiple auteurs like John Waters and Todd Solondz have been up front about the difficulty of getting financing for their films. Nicole Kidman, one of the most employed actors in the biz, said last year that it’s hard to get a greenlight on anything (except maybe Deadpool). “I just think that’s the nature of what we’re dealing with now. Things are shrinking in terms of shows being done and films being made,” she said. “I definitely feel it. I’m sure most people in the industry feel it. I know the crews feel it. I know writers feel it.”

Tarantino still plans to make his “final” film, but he’s “in no hurry to actually jump into production,” he told the Sundance crowd, adding that he wanted his son to be old enough to join him on set and have memories of the experience. In the meantime, he’s “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,” he said.