‘Killer Crow’: The Quentin Tarantino movie we will probably never see
There are ideas that virtually every filmmaker has kicking around in their heads for years, if not decades, and while many of them come to fruition eventually, the chances of Quentin Tarantino ever getting around to Killer Crow are virtually non-existent.
After all, the two-time Academy Award winner has remained adamant that The Movie Critic will be his final feature, putting the exclamation point on his long-held desire to bow out at a nice even ten. By extension, unless they eventually appear as novels, comic books, stage productions, or TV shows, every potential project teased by Tarantino will be shelved permanently.
The filmmaker was two decades into his career before he made a full-blown period piece, and when he did, he was clearly bitten by the historical bug after helming Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained back-to-back. He envisioned them as a loosely connected trilogy of sorts, with Killer Crow touted as the final chapter.
Tarantino confirmed as much in an interview with The Root, and it would feature cameo appearances from at least one of the Basterds to boot. “That would be the third of the trilogy. It would be Inglourious Basterds, too, because Inglourious Basterds are in it, but it is about the soldiers,” he explained. “It would be called Killer Crow or something like that.”
As for the plot, Tarantino planned to revisit the universe of his previous World War II epic, but approach the story from a completely different perspective. “My original idea for Inglourious Basterds way back when was that this would be a huge story that included the smaller story that you saw in the film, but also followed a bunch of black troops, and they had been fucked over by the American military and kind of go apeshit.”
“The way Aldo Raine and the Basterds are having an ‘Apache resistance’, black troops go on an Apache warpath and kill a bunch of white soldiers and white officers on a military base and are just making a warpath to Switzerland,” he continued. A companion piece of sorts, then, but that was about as much information on Killer Crow as Tarantino was willing to divulge.
Tarantino did admit he was originally “going to do it as a miniseries”, but when he settled on a feature, “that was a section I had to take out to help tame my material.” He said that he had “most of that written” and “it’s ready to go”, but that was in December 2012.
Since then, Tarantino has directed The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with The Movie Critic next – and last – on the docket, meaning Killer Crow is destined to go down as just one of many enticing-sounding movies that he never ended up making.
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