More details revealed in new Hollywood Reporter article

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/quentin-tarantino-movie-critic-what-happened-1235879479/

The film’s exact story details are not known, but sources familiar with the project dropped a couple intriguing ideas to THR that Tarantino was toying with. One was that the Hollywood-set tale could serve as a Tarantino goodbye meta-verse with the director’s earlier movies existing in the same era of The Movie Critic (which could work, given that his films have a ’70s vibe). That way, Tarantino could bring back some of the stars of his earlier work to reprise their iconic characters in “movie within a movie” moments, or to play fictional versions of themselves as the actors who played those characters. Another idea was that the film could include a movie theater where some characters could potentially interact with a budding future auteur — such as a 16-year-old Tarantino, who worked as an usher at a Torrence porn theater (“I was tall enough to get away with it,” Tarantino once explained).

In recent months, the production has been — as Jules Winnfield might put it — beset on all sides by the tyrannies of casting rumors. At one point, The Movie Critic was going to shoot a short sequence in February with actor-wrestler Paul Walter Hauser, but a source close to the actor says “he was never involved.” There were also reports that previous Tarantino stars John Travolta, Jamie Foxx and Margot Robbie were going to take part in his cinematic farewell. There was even speculation that Tom Cruise would be in the film. Cruise, in Tarantino lore, was first eyed for Pitt’s Once Upon a Time role, but scheduling forced him to bow out. Fans were shipping a Cruise-Tarantino pairing, but The Movie Critic wasn’t actually going to bring them together. According to sources, Cruise hadn’t even met with the filmmaker for a role.

The question now becomes: What next? Tarantino has been talking about retirement since as far back as 2009, when he said he wanted to quit directing films before he was 60 (the filmmaker turned 61 in March). He’s been talking about ending with 10 films since at least 2014. Some of his previously considered yet unmade projects include an R-rated Star Trek movie, a Kill Bill: Vol 3, and a Django and Zorro team-up. Whatever his eventual choice of project, the 10th-and-final designation will surely result in an unprecedented amount of fan and media anticipation for the film, which perhaps only adds to Tarantino’s self-generated burden to get his last one right.