Quentin Tarantino is renowned for claiming that he's imposed a ten-film limit on himself. With rumors of an upcoming Kill Bill: Volume 3, the internet is once again abuzz with discourse about whether this could be the Pulp Fiction director's final filmmaking foray.
Tarantino has famously declared multiple projects his "final film." Most recently, perhaps, in 2019, the director called Once Upon a Time in Hollywood "epilogue-y" at a Moscow press conference promoting the film. "If you think about the idea of all the movies telling one story and each film is like a train boxcar connected to each other, this one would sort of be the big showstopping climax of it all," he said. "And I could imagine that the 10th one would be a little more epilogue-y."
Tarantino quickly added that he has "one more to make" and provided no further details at the time. With the recent resurgence in rumors about a sequel to Kill Bill: Volume 2, could the director's so-called "Dollars Trilogy" be the final piece of art he puts into the world?
Ground Control to Major QT: Ten, Nine, Eight...
Part of the hubbub is Tarantino's self-professed, self-imposed limitation of only making ten movies. However, this metric is lax, and Tarantino appears to count his films in his own way: although he billed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as being his 10th movie, in reality, it's his ninth. To get to his metric, it requires you to consider 2003's Kill Bill: Volume 1 and 2004's Kill Bill: Vol. 2 to be one movie, which further begs the question: will Kill Bill: Vol. 3 not count as movie ten because it's just part three of the long, long Kill Bill: Complete Director's Cut?
Second, Tarantino's metric requires fans to not only disregard all of his accomplished screenplays, having worked on Natural Bone KIllers and From Dusk till Dawn and guest directing spots, but it also requires fans to disregard Death Proof. This 2007 movie was half of the gloriously gory double feature, Grindhouse. But considering a feature-length cut of Death Proof was released alongside a feature-length cut of Planet Terror and is (roughly) half of Grindhouse that was directed by Robert Rodriguez (The Book of Boba Fett), it also counts. So although Tarantino may consider Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as his ninth movie, it's actually his tenth full-length future film he's directed during his career.
However, Tarantino has gotten a lot of press coverage out of his titular ten-film limit, which he brought up during a 2014 Q&A during an American Film Market event. While Deadline reported at the time that he was clear that his plan was not "etched in stone," in the intervening years, the internet has relied on the remark time and again to postulate whether Tarantino's next movie will be his last.
QT's Inglorious Marketing Gimmick
By suggesting his movies are a "limited product," Tarantino can generate millions of words of internet discourse about "which film may be his last" and buzz for his latest box office project. For moviegoers wanting concrete examples, there are plenty. There are so many that it's hard to go back far enough to find the articles speculating 2015's The Hateful Eight would be Tarantino's last flick (primarily because he threw a fit on the Howard Stern Show when a pre-existing contract meant that Star Wars – Episode VII: The Force Awakens got the Cinerama Dome screen during the opening weekend for Tarantino's snowbound Western).
In a May 2021 interview with Pure Cinema Podcast, Tarantino said, "Most directors have horrible last movies. Usually, their worst movies are their last movies." He went on to say that 2019's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood could be his last filmmaking effort: "Most directors' last films are f*cking lousy. Maybe I should not make another movie because I could be really happy with dropping the mic on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."
Then, a month later, in June 2021, Tarantino appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and claimed that he had considered a Reservoir Dogs reboot as his last movie. Still, then he said, "I won't do it, internet," eradicating any doubt whether this "ten-film limit" was anything other than an attempt to generate content on the web.
Where No Tarantino Has Gone Before
Fortunately, there is one property that it seems like Tarantino won't be directing as his final outing: Star Trek. While a Tarantino Trek feature was rumored once upon a time in Hollywood, it seems like that sequel – which would have put the actors from the J.J. Abrams-helmed Kevlin timeline, getting a "Piece of the Action" in a story that saw them trapped in a gangster-style planet – was officially canned when it was determined that the tone wouldn't fit with Trek's utopian vision for the future.
Kill Bill 3 should be the final Tarantino film, especially if we're being threatened with a Tarantino Trek as number eleven, or is that thirteen... or is that twelve, who can keep count? Although it should be his last film, more Uma Thurman kicking butt in a yellow catsuit with black stripes, please.