Quentin Tarantino used to have a very bad habit of spitballing potential projects in interviews. Some would garner a single offhand mention and others would be brought up again and again before ultimately meeting their end in his mental waste basket. Care for a taste of “what probably never would have been”?
- Double V Vega – The oft-rumored Vega Brothers prequel uniting Travolta & Madsen (and possibly Gandolfini). QT finally put the kibosh on this one years ago, but still teases a comic or novel version of it from time to time.
- Sequels and prequels to Inglourious Basterds and a handful of animated Kill Bill prequels.
- Various adaptations and remakes: Forty Lashes Less One, The Switch, Freaky Deaky, Killshot, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Halloween VI, Friday The 13th Part XI, Come Drink With Me, Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!, Fulci’s The Psychic (aka Seven Notes In Black), etc.
- An airplane disaster project, a slasher film, a giallo, a ’50s-style melodrama, a straight-forward blaxploitation crime send-up, a John Brown biopic, a Texas Rangers project, a straight-up kung fu film in Mandarin, etc. The list goes on and on.
Quentin is a cinefiend. If he was immortal and had limited funds, we would probably see him tackle virtually every genre and subgenre out there at some point. Since that isn’t the case, he is left to make a film every few years and pontificate in-between about all the ones that will never be. While he used to do this publicly, he’s cut back on it a lot since he unleashed the Kill Bill duology about a decade ago. In fact, to my knowledge he has really only mentioned four projects since 2009 in a serious fashion: a John Brown biopic, a western, a Prohibition-era gangster flick, and Kill The Bride (aka Kill Bill: Volume Three). About two years ago he narrowed those four down to two for his 2012 project, claiming that he would work on the gangster and western scripts simultaneously until one of them won out and save the other for later. The latter came out on top and hits theaters this month in the form of Django Unchained.
Quentin has been obsessed with the South in relation to slavery for some time now. The aforementioned Forty Lashes Less One adaptation that he considered doing in the late ’90s would have had an African American lead. The initial idea for his half of Grindhouse centered on a group of teens mucking about an abandoned Southern plantation that was haunted by the murderous ghost of a Civil War-era slave. And then, of course, you the his interest in John Brown and a half-jokingly proposed Basterds sequel involving Aldo & Co. carving up the KKK. Four different ideas, all centering on the same subject: slavery in America. All of which could have been interesting on their own. All of which have been cleared off the board in favor of channeling said obsession through his love of spaghetti westerns. Where does that leave the other two though?
While I assume his Pretty Boy Floyd-esque gangster script is still in play, you can scratch Kill The Bride off the list. Tarantino has expressed a desire off and on over the past decade to revisit Beatrix Kiddo and her spawn ten years later in a sequel that would have arrived around 2014 or so. In a recent interview, however, he expressed that he has since changed his mind:
“I don’t know if there’s ever going to be a Kill Bill. Vol 3. We’ll see, probably not though.”
Sounds like a big fat “NO!” to me. He also goes on to say that he has no interest in being involved with the James Bond franchise, but that was already a no-brainer. Fine by me on both counts. Could a third Kill Bill be interesting? Of course, but we don’t need one. Let it be. Or do produce it as a graphic novel and/or animated film. Just not as your next theatrical outing, Quentin. Keep your eyes on the road ahead, not the pavement behind.
What will come next? It’s hard to say. It could be the oft-mentioned foray into classic gangster cinema. It could be a full-blown horror outing, given his immense love for the genre. It could be something entirely different. There’s no way of knowing, especially when Tarantino himself likely has no idea. The only thing that I can say for sure is that Kill The Bride is officially dead for the time being and I, like the rest of you, cannot wait to see Django Unchained come Christmas.
Source | We Got This Covered