This week marks the 20th anniversary of Kill Bill: Vol. 1, which has us wondering about all those rumors of potential sequels and continuations that have been floating around ever since the saga seemingly concluded in Kill Bill: Vol. 2. If Quentin Tarantino is serious about retiring after directing his 10th film that would make his next project, reportedly a ’70s-set drama about a movie critic, his last. That means all the other ideas he’s talked about over the years may never be fully realized—no Kill Bill sequel, no Vega brothers spinoff, no Bond film, no Star Trek reimagining. And we think that’s a damn shame. Of the many rumored or abandoned Tarantino projects, these are the ones we believe had the most potential for greatness. Perhaps one day he’ll rethink his self-imposed limit and return to one or more of them.
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Seven Notes In Black
Seven Notes In Black
Reports of Tarantino working on a remake of Lucio Fulci’s 1977 Italian horror film Sette Note In Nero (released in the U.S. as The Psychic) have been cropping up since he first indicated his interest in the late ’90s, but there’s never been any real reported progress. The twisty murder mystery centers on a woman whose psychic visions lead her to the discovery of human remains hidden behind a wall in an abandoned house. When her husband is accused of the murder she teams up with a paranormal investigator to clear his name. Tarantino did repurpose some of the film’s famous seven-note score in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, but he never secured the rights to the film itself. So as much as we’d like to see Tarantino’s take on giallo, we don’t see a future for this project in our crystal ball.
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Double V Vega
Double V Vega
The idea of a crime film uniting Reservoir Dogs’ Vic Vega (Michael Madsen) and his brother, Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega (John Travolta), doesn’t have the same appeal now as it may have had a decade ago. It just feels like something that belongs to another era, and not just because both of those guys are getting a little old to play the characters in a prequel (which it would have to be, since neither of them survived their films). Tarantino did reveal that the title would have been Double V Vega and that it would have taken place during Vincent’s time in Amsterdam, but let’s be real—fans have talked way more about this potential project in the last 10 years than Tarantino has.
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Forty Lashes Less One
Forty Lashes Less One
Tarantino’s affection for the work of Elmore Leonard came through in Jackie Brown, his blaxploitation-themed adaptation of Leonard’s novel Rum Punch. At some point, Tarantino also had the rights to adapt another Leonard story, Forty Lashes Less One. The plot sounds readymade for the Tarantino treatment. It’s a Western about a pair of convicted murderers—one Black, the other Apache—who are offered a pardon in exchange for hunting down five of the most dangerous outlaws in the West.
Tarantino fans have been following this potential project with interest for more than two decades now. There were even wild rumors making the internet rounds in the early 2000s that Tarantino was shooting this film in secret. Obviously, they turned out to be unsubstantiated. In 2007, the filmmaker said in an interview with fan site The Quentin Tarantino Archives that he’d written about 20 pages of a script for it. As of 2015, he still retained the rights to the book. There’s also been some talk about turning it into a TV miniseries, though that hasn’t gone anywhere either.
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Kill Bill Vol. 3
Kill Bill Vol. 3
The success of the Kill Bill films naturally gave rise to speculation about the continuation of the story. Tarantino even planted the seeds for a legacyquel in the first film, long before the term was even coined. After Vernita Green’s (Vivica A. Fox) daughter Nikki witnesses Beatrix Kiddo kill her mother, Kiddo tells her, “It was not my intention to do this in front of you. For that I’m sorry. But you can take my word for it, your mother had it comin’. When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting.”
A couple of recent developments stirred the pot once again for another Kill Bill. First, Tarantino cast Uma Thurman’s daughter Maya Hawke as Flower Child in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, leading many to think he was testing her out for a future role as Beatrix Kiddo’s grown-up fictional daughter B.B. in a Kill Bill sequel. Tarantino seemingly ruled that out in July. Then, earlier this year, Fox made a surprise cameo in SZA’s Tarantino-inspired music video for her song “Kill Bill” and sparked another round of rumors that the singer-songwriter was hinting at her interest in playing Nikki, or even that she’d already been cast. This time it was Fox who put the matter to rest in an interview with CBR. Speaking about the hype that followed the video’s release, she said: “I was like, ‘No, it’s just a song, and she loves Kill Bill.’”
Tarantino has been fielding questions about this potential sequel for nearly two decades now, and there’s no sign that they’ll stop coming any time soon. Either the continued interest will galvanize his position to never revisit the story again or he’ll finally break down and give the people what they want. We know what we’re hoping for.
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A James Bond film
A James Bond film
Believe it or not, a James Bond film directed by Quentin Tarantino was once a real possibility. Years before Daniel Craig’s first outing as 007 was in development, Tarantino was in talks with Ian Fleming’s estate about making his version of Casino Royale, under the impression that the book’s complicated rights history would allow him to adapt it as a standalone project (it had already been adapted once before, as a spoof starring Peter Sellers and David Niven in 1967). If it had worked out, it would have been his next film after Pulp Fiction. It turned out that the Broccoli family had subsequently purchased the rights to Fleming’s entire body of work, including Casino Royale. They would go on to produce it as an official Bond film in 2006, with Craig stepping into the role.
Speaking to Deadline in Cannes last May, Tarantino talked about his vision for the project: “It would’ve taken place in the ’60s and wasn’t about a series of Bond movies. We would have cast an actor and be one and done.” This was the same interview in which he famously dissed Netflix movies, so the details of his past flirtation with Bond may have gotten lost in the fuss.
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Grindhouse 2
Grindhouse 2
Since there have been parallel rumors of a second Grindhouse film involving a kung fu segment directed by Tarantino as well as a separate kung fu feature, we’re combining them into a single abandoned project. It’s equally unlikely that either of them will ever see the light of day anyway. Tarantino’s interest in tackling an homage to wuxia films was piqued after seeing House Of Flying Daggers in 2004. He reportedly planned on directing a martial arts feature following Kill Bill Vol. 2 in which all the dialogue would be spoken in Mandarin. In 2007, Variety reported on a similar project, but indicated that instead of a standalone film it would be a segment in the next planned Grindhouse film Tarantino was then working on with director pal Robert Rodriguez. There hasn’t been much movement on either project since.
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Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
If anyone could capture the spirit of this unhinged 1960s sexploitation film in a modern remake about a trio of go-go dancers on a wild crime spree in the California desert, it would be Tarantino. Russ Meyer’s original Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has clearly had a direct influence on Tarantino’s work, so it makes sense that he would want to go back to the source for a modernized version. Some of the casting choices Tarantino has mentioned in the past include Kim Kardashian, Eva Mendes, Britney Spears, and even porn star Tera Patrick, so we have a pretty good idea of the direction he would have taken with this. Tura Satana, who appeared in the original film, told the siteWe Are Movie Geeks in 2008 that Tarantino was “definitely making it” and that she would “definitely be involved.” Neither of those statements ever panned out, unfortunately.
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Untitled Medieval Project
Untitled Medieval Project
There have been lots of “untitled fill-in-the-genre” projects associated with Tarantino over the years—a comedic Spaghetti Western, a 1930s gangster film, a disaster film, even a family film aimed at kids (that would be something, wouldn’t it?). If you’ve ever seen or heard Tarantino speak in an interview you know that he has a tendency to answer in stream-of-consciousness monologues about whatever pops into his head. Sometimes these idle musings are treated by film journalists as an announcement of some new project potentially in the works. So we’re not going to pretend that his pitch about a medieval film starring Helen Mirren as a foul-mouthed queen and filled with bloody violence was ever actually going to happen, but it sure is fun to think about. She was reportedly interested, too.
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Killer Crow
Killer Crow
Tarantino told The Root in 2012 that he was considering a third film in what would have been a thematic anti-oppression trilogy following Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. It was to be another World War II film set in 1944 about a unit of Black soldiers who turn on the American military and go on an “Apache warpath” through Europe. The idea was part of a larger story back when he was still envisioning Inglourious Basterds as a sweeping miniseries. Once it became a feature film, Tarantino had to narrow the focus of the plot and dropped the storyline, though it was nearly completely written. He kept thinking about it, though. “That would be the third of the trilogy,” Tarantino said. “It would be [connected to] Inglourious Basterds, too, because [they] are in it, but it is about the soldiers. It would be called Killer Crow or something like that.” Brad Pitt was even on board with the idea, but that’s pretty much the last anyone’s heard of it.
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An R-rated Star Trek
An R-rated Star Trek
At one point, Tarantino was attached to direct the fourth film in the Star Trek reboot series launched by J.J. Abrams in 2009. A fan of the original 1960s series, Tarantino pitched what he describes as “Pulp Fiction in space.” It would’ve been inspired by the 1968 Star Trek episode “A Piece Of The Action” and wouldn’t have taken place in the new timeline Abrams established in Star Trek. Paramount brought on a team of writers, including Mark L. Smith, Lindsey Beer, Drew Pearce, and Megan Amram, to develop the script, and even agreed to let it be the first R-rated Star Trek film. It’s kind of amazing that the project got as far along as it did.
The film would have been Tarantino’s next project after Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, possibly making it his final work as a director. Perhaps ending his legacy as a hired hand on an established IP factored into his decision to step away, but that’s just a guess. We do know that he was still planning on making it as recently as 2019. By 2020, though, he was telling Deadline, “I think they might make that movie, but I just don’t think I’m going to direct it. It’s a good idea. They should definitely do it and I’ll be happy to come in and give them some notes on the first rough cut.”