Quentin Tarantino says 2019 was “the last f***ing year of movies”

Quentin Tarantino isn’t fond of the current state of the movie industry, saying 2019 was “the last f***ing year of movies.”

Quentin Tarantino isn’t too happy with the current state of cinema, even going so far as to say that 2019 was “the last f***ing year of movies.“

The director recently spoke with film critic Elvis Mitchell at the Sundance Film Festival and revealed that he’s working on a play right now. “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,” he said. “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.” Tarantino added that writing a play has been a genuine challenge for him, and then he took a stab at the modern movie industry.

“That’s a big f***ing 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 f*** is a movie now?” Tarantino said. “What — something that plays in theaters for a token release for four f***ing 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 f***ing year of movies. That was a sh*t 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.“

For the record, Tarantino’s last movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, was released in 2019. While there have been plenty of fantastic movies released in the last five years, which I’m sure Tarantino would agree with, the industry has taken a turn since COVID-19. Studios turned to streaming services throughout the pandemic, and even when theaters were back in the swing of things, the once lengthy theatrical window had shrunk significantly. Even movies which were doing well at the box office were given a digital release just a month after they debuted.