It's been six years since Quentin Tarantino released his last movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and with nothing scheduled for this year, there's going to be more dry years than that. It's the longest break he's ever had in his filmmaking, although it seems it wasn't entirely voluntary as he stopped work on The Movie Critic the other year.
His next movie will be his tenth, which he has previously said is the number he will make before retiring from filmmaking, although he has seemingly backpedaled a bit from that statement in recent years. But it doesn't seem impossible that he will retire before then, as Tarantino is extremely critical of today's film world, saying that 2019 was his last good year and that he now prefers theatre.
During a discussion with film critic (via Entertainment Weekly) Elvis Mitchell, Tarantino said:
"That's a big fucking 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 fuck is a movie now? What — something that plays in theaters for a token release for four fucking weeks? All right, and by the second week you can watch it on television."
He believes that the medium of movies has been in continuous decline for a long time, and explains why he prefers theater instead:
"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 fucking year of movies. That was a shit 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 [streaming service] and that one. Okay. Theater? You can't do that. It's the final frontier."
At the moment, Tarantino is working on a theatre script and work on his upcoming tenth and potentially final film is on hold. How long remains to be seen.