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‘It would have been cool’: what happened to Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek movie?

Screenwriter Mark L Smith has revealed details of the violent, sweary script he penned in collaboration with Tarantino for Captain Kirk and co – and explained why it probably won’t get made

N ot so long ago, the idea of Quentin Tarantino making a Star Trek movie seemed as far out as a tribble one day captaining the starship Enterprise. Perhaps that’s why QT shelved his long-mooted “R-rated”, ultra-violent take on the Apollo-era optimism of Gene Roddenberry – or perhaps he just figured he had other projects worth prioritising.

Back in 2017, Tarantino publicly pitched the idea of a feature-length riff on the 1968 original series episode A Piece of the Action , which is set on an Earth-like planet where a 1930s gangster culture prevails. At the time, the space saga was in mainstream blockbuster mode on the big screen, thanks to the series of JJ Abrams-produced films, and was just beginning to find its feet once again on TV with the first series of Star Trek: Discovery. It was not a period in which the franchise seemed suited to Tarantino’s intense yet insouciantly loquacious, magpie-eye style.

Fast forward a few years and Star Trek seems to be in a much more creative space. The deeply retro Strange New Worlds (I can still hear the unexpected brilliance of that splendid musical episode in season two ringing through my cerebrum) boasts an almost Tarantino-esque sense of cosmic opulence, so confident is it in applying fresh spins to a series that’s now well over half a century old. Even Black Mirror spotted that there’s spiky fun to be had satirising the original series’ cheesy idealism. Perhaps Tarantino was onto something after all?

Writer Mark L Smith, who was hired by Paramount to write a long-since-abandoned Star Trek script for the Pulp Fiction film-maker to direct, seems to think so. Speaking to Collider , he confirms the film would have been bloodthirsty and not a little sweary.

“I think his vision was just to go hard,” revealed Smith. “It was a hard R. It was going to be some Pulp Fiction violence. Not a lot of the language – we saved a couple things for just special characters to kind of drop that into the Star Trek world – but it was just really the edginess and the kind of Tarantino flair that he was bringing to it. It would have been cool.”

Just how close did this thing come to being made? Smith suggests that the project – one of a number of abandoned movies that were at some point lined up to follow on from 2016’s Star Trek Beyond – was really abandoned because QT couldn’t get his head around the idea of it being his 10th and final film.

“This was such a particular, different type of story that Quentin wanted to tell with it, that it fit my kind of sensibilities,” said Smith. “So I wrote that, Quentin and I went back and forth, he was gonna do some stuff on it, and then he started worrying about the number – his kind of unofficial number of films.

“I remember we were talking, and he goes, ‘If I can just wrap my head around the idea that Star Trek could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?’ And I think that was the bump he could never get across. So the script is still sitting there on his desk.

“I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those that I can’t ever see happening. But it would be the greatest Star Trek film. Not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was a balls-out kind of thing.”

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The fact that there is an actual script out there somewhere will fuel the nerdy fantasies of those of us who love to imagine those “lost” movies that never got made. But it sounds very much as if Smith’s screenplay was written entirely with Tarantino in mind, which means it’s highly unlikely to ever see the light, now that the director has announced something called The Movie Critic will be his 10th and final film.

Perhaps this is for the best. Whatever you think of Tarantino, he’s the only director out there who can pull off such high-end riffs on gloriously fringe motion-picture magic; the culture-vulture auteur with the freakishly alchemical ability to turn trashy midnight madness cinema into critic-baiting, Oscar-winning movie gold. Asking anyone else to shoot the Star Trek script would be like finding a stash of unrecorded Beatles songs and suggesting someone other than John, Paul, George and Ringo bash out a new album.

On the other hand, we already know Tarantino doesn’t seem so worried about outstaying his welcome , so long as he’s allowed to continue creating in other media . If Smith’s script doesn’t work as a feature film, is there any reason it couldn’t be rewired for a future small-screen episode? After all, stranger, wonderful things seem to be happening every minute in the modern Star Trek era.

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Star Trek: We Dodged a Photon Torpedo with Quentin Tarantino’s Movie

While Quentin Tarantino remains one of the consummate filmmakers of his time, Star Trek was just not a good fit.

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Quentin Tarantino, Star Trek Beyond, and A Piece of the Action

When the news broke in December 2017 that Quentin Tarantino had approached Paramount Pictures with a pitch for a new Star Trek film , one could hear the collective sound of countless fans’ jaws dropping open. One of the most respected (and controversial) filmmakers of his time, the imagination behind modern classics like Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds , wanted to put his imprimatur on one of the most beloved (if creaky) sci-fi franchises of all time?

Apparently that was the case, even if it was unclear whether Tarantino actually wanted to direct the thing himself or just sort of shepherd his story idea to the screen. A writers’ room was convened, with different scribes proposing different ways to flesh out Tarantino’s pitch, with The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith eventually winning the gig.

Thus began a confusing, four-year journey through development hell for what might have been as many as three different Trek features . Over the past few years, as Tarantino’s interest in the project faded, directors and writers such as Noah Hawley ( Legion ) and S.J. Clarkson ( Jessica Jones ) were attached at different points, with Matt Shakman ( WandaVision ) eventually landing in the director’s chair in mid-2021.

Different scripts were also apparently bandied about, with both a direct sequel to 2016’s Star Trek Beyond (Clarkson) and yet another reboot with a different set of characters ( Hawley ) both in the mix. Meanwhile, even though he officially withdrew from directing the film , the script based on Tarantino’s story idea still lurked in the background.

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It was only in February 2022 when Paramount announced that a new Trek film under Shakman’s direction (with the latest script penned by Josh Friedman and Cameron Squires) was going into production later this year for a Dec. 22, 2023 release, that Tarantino’s version was unequivocally declared dead.

That’s probably a good thing.

What Was Tarantino’s Star Trek Story About?

While we have the utmost respect for Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker (even if we’ve been a little cold on his last couple of films) and believe that he is truly a Star Trek fan with his heart in the right place, we never were and are still unable to imagine him directing a Trek adventure.

For one thing, Variety recently confirmed again longstanding reports regarding exactly what Tarantino’s pitch was, calling it “a largely earthbound story set in a 1930s gangster setting” that involved time travel and did feature the most recent “Kelvin timeline” cast (or at least Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk). The story seemed to be a direct take on the famous second season episode of the original series, “A Piece of the Action.”

Written by David P. Harmon and Trek producer Gene L. Coon, “A Piece of the Action” had the crew of the Enterprise investigating a planet of highly imitative humanoids who based their entire culture around a book left behind by an Earth ship a century earlier–in this case, a book about 1920s Chicago mob organizations.

The episode is fondly remembered as part of a string of second season episodes that leaned in a comedic direction–along with “I, Mudd” and “The Trouble with Tribbles”–while allowing Kirk and Spock to romp around in pinstripe suits and fedora hats as they brandished tommy guns and convinced the rival gangs to “cooperate wid us and, uh, maybe we’ll cut choo in for a piece o’ da action.”

It’s still a fun watch, but it’s also an example of some of the laziest writing that permeated the original Trek in its second season, one of a number of episodes in which the Enterprise found itself orbiting a planet patterned after an old Earth culture (thus allowing the production to use standing period sets instead of building exotic new futuristic ones).

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Why Tarantino’s Star Trek Might Have Sunk the Franchise For Good

As we said, “A Piece of the Action” may still be an enjoyable Star Trek episode in many ways, but to hang an entire feature film on this premise –the Enterprise running up against early American gangster culture in a time travel adventure set on Earth–would, we believe, prove to be a disappointment.

For one thing, the Enterprise traveling back to Earth’s past and generating laughs has already been done: the most successful of the original cast’s six features, 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home , featured the crew going back to then-modern day San Francisco to save some whales and bring them forward to the future. The gangster angle would not only rehash “A Piece of the Action” to some degree, but it would also bring Star Trek directly into Tarantino’s wheelhouse, had he indeed chosen to direct the film. His first five features are all immersed in the world of thugs, criminals, and gangsters, while two of his four subsequent movies feature criminal elements in different environments.

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And while he has experimented with alternate histories in Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood , he has never directed a pure science fiction film. Most of his movies are set either in a gritty present or an equally gritty, hyper-realistic period scenario.

Add to this the fact that Tarantino’s Trek movie was purportedly going to be–had it gone into production– the first R-rated effort in what had traditionally always been a family-friendly franchise, and it becomes clear that Tarantino would have made a Tarantino movie, dressed in the trappings of Star Trek , instead of lending his formidable talent and energy to the franchise while keeping its basic foundations intact.

It’s our belief that this, while perhaps done with good intentions, would have alienated Trek fans already let down by Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond , while providing Tarantino devotees and the rest of the public with an odd curio that might not have found an audience with anyone.

Beyond Tarantino

So what happens with Star Trek now? The world has obviously changed since Star Trek Beyond did not light up the box office nearly six years ago, with Paramount/Viacom/CBS shifting the focus to streaming and generating an incredible four new Star Trek series in the past five years , with a fifth imminent , and at least two more in development .

But the studio insists that Star Trek still has a future in feature films with the announcement of a release date for the new movie while confirming the return of the Kelvin cast ( much to their surprise , apparently), indicating the company’s commitment to restoring the Trek franchise to the big screen.

What will the new Star Trek movie be about? We have no idea, really, but here are a few things we’d like to not see in the fourth Kelvin timeline adventure: Chris Hemsworth as Kirk’s dad (no more daddy issues, please, he’s the captain of a goddamned starship), time travel of any kind, more of the Spock-Uhura romance (time for the First Officer to Vulcan up), motorcycle stunts, a revenge-driven villain, and any kind of deep state conspiracy inside the Federation or Starfleet.

Also let’s not take a cue from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and create a multiverse in which the casts of Star Trek: Discovery , Star Trek: Picard , and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds can cameo (we bet that’s been discussed though).

How about an adventure in which the Enterprise encounters a strange new alien race or space-based phenomena that poses an ethical or moral conflict and/or some kind of physical danger for the crew? Can that really be so hard? They used to do ’em every week (most of them still pretty good), and that was 55 years ago!

Let Star Trek be Star Trek . It’s not gonna make a billion dollars at the box office. It’s not Marvel, it’s not Star Wars , and, most of all, it’s not Pulp Fiction in Starfleet uniforms. We could be wrong, but we suspect that fans would not have wanted a piece of that action.

Don Kaye | @donkaye

Don Kaye is an entertainment journalist by trade and geek by natural design. Born in New York City, currently ensconced in Los Angeles, his earliest childhood memory is…

Star Trek's Kelvin Timeline Could Still Get One More 'Final Chapter' Movie

There's more "Star Trek" television right now that Trekkies know what to do with. Whether you prefer it when the franchise is philosophical yet whimsical in the manner of Gene Roddenberry's original ground-breaking series ("Strange New Worlds"), a mix of raunchy humor and emotionally mature sci-fi storytelling ("Lower Decks"), or embracing a "warm, flashy, 'heart dangling on the sleeve with such force that you might as well brace for an aerial spray' ethos" (as /Film's own Jacob Hall put it in his review of the "Discovery" season 5 premiere ), there's something for "Trek" enthusiasts of ever shade right now — again, on the small screen. Unfortunately, if you enjoy it when the property stretches its wings and takes flight in theaters, you've been plumb out of luck since 2016.

Indeed, the last eight years have been a never-ending cycle of news about "Star Trek" films being put into development, only to fall apart faster than the USS Enterprise's hull in ... well, take your pick, the ship's been trashed in a whole lot of movies and shows by this point. From "Fargo" and "Legion" showrunner Noah Hawley to Quentin Tarantino , "WandaVision" director Matt Shakman , and even "Madame Web" mastermind S.J. Clarkson (yes, we're referring to Clarkson as a "mastermind" now, I've just decided), a whole lot of people have tried their hand at reviving the "Star Trek" films to no avail. Now, Variety is reporting that Steve Yockey — who developed the acclaimed Max series "The Flight Attendant" based on Chris Bohjalian's original novel — will take a roll of the dice himself by becoming the latest writer to take a stab at what's simply being called "Star Trek 4" (i.e. the fourth movie set in the "Star Trek" Kelvin timeline).

The budget's the thing

Here we go again. (I'm quoting the wrong sci-fi franchise , I'm aware, but stay with me.) In a massive cover story titled "The Future of 'Star Trek': From 'Starfleet Academy' to New Movies and Michelle Yeoh, How the 58-Year-Old Franchise Is Planning for the Next Generation of Fans," Variety revealed that Paramount is once again trying to make what it's referring to as a "final chapter" in the Kelvin timeline film series. Like the previous attempts, the earliest of which had Chris Hemsworth reprising his role as George Kirk from J.J. Abrams' 2009 "Star Trek" thanks to a bit of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey business (again, wrong sci-fi property, I know), this one would see Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, and John Cho (minus the late Anton Yelchin) reprising their roles as the alternate universe/Kelvin timeline versions of the Enterprise's beloved crew once more.

So, what's got Paramount convinced this attempt will succeed where the others did not? According to Variety, the studio is said to be really focused on "rightsizing" the price tag after 2016's "Star Trek Beyond" saw its budget sky-rocket to $185 million, a number far too big for a franchise that's only ever been modestly successful at the box office. Pine himself previously criticized the studio's strategy of " trying to compete with the Marvels of the world " (as he put it), and most Trekkies would surely agree that scaling things back would serve the project well, arguing that "Star Trek" has never benefitted from trying to be a splashy action franchise . This would also be a chance to finally give the Kelvin timeline a proper ending more in keeping with the core values of "Star Trek," assuming Paramount likes what Yockey brings to the table.

Keep it tuned to /Film for all your future "Star Trek" updates.

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Rebel wilson accuses sacha baron cohen of “a**hole move” after video shows them together on set, quentin tarantino passed on directing ‘star trek’ film because he didn’t want that movie to be his last.

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Smith continued, “And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk. I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those that I can’t ever see happening. But it would be the greatest Star Trek film, not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was just a balls-out kind of thing.”

Tarantino has been open about wanting to retire from directing after completing ten films with The Movie Critic set to potentially be his last . Smith noted that Tarantino’s take on Star Trek would’ve been rated with a “Hard R.”

“I think his vision was just to go hard. It was a hard R. It was going to be some Pulp Fiction violence,” Smith added. “Not a lot of the language, we saved a couple things for just special characters to kind of drop that into the Star Trek world, but it was just really the edginess and the kind of that Tarantino flair, man, that he was bringing to it. It would have been cool.”

News of a fourth Star Trek film date back to 2016 when it was announced that Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Bad Robot were going to continue collaborating on another installment ahead of the release of Star Trek: Beyond .

Tarantino’s involvement in the franchise would be reported the following year when it was announced a the director had an idea for the next installment. Reports also mentioned that Tarantino required the film to be rated R , as Smith confirmed in his recent interview.

“I liked it because I think it’s different, but the way that [Thor] Ragnarok changed things. It was like suddenly it had a different feel for the Marvel stuff,” he said. “It was like, ‘That’s fun. That’s different.’ And I guess Guardians [of the Galaxy] to some level, but it was just like a different vibe and that’s what I thought that it could bring to Star Trek was just a different feel.”

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Everything we know so far about Quentin Tarantino's 'Star Trek' movie, which will be rated R

Quentin Tarantino wants to direct a "Star Trek" movie.
The catch? It has to be rated R.
J.J. Abrams is reportedly helping Tarantino find a writer and will be a producer.
Tarantino is also working on a screenplay himself.
The movie probably won't be made for while, since Tarantino is working on his next project, "Once Upon a Time In Hollywood," about the murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family.

Quentin Tarantino is planning to direct a "Star Trek" movie, and his only demand is that it be rated R.

Deadline reported in December 2017 that Tarantino pitched an R-rated "Star Trek" movie to Paramount. Days later, Deadline reported that the rumored project was moving forward at a rapid speed and that a screenwriter was already being selected.

J.J. Abrams, who has directed two "Star Trek" films, is helping Tarantino and will be a producer. The movie is unlikely to arrive for a few years, but a "Star Trek" movie from Tarantino — one of the most ambitious directors of all time — is an exciting concept, and we can't wait to see the finished product.

In April 2018, actor Zachary Quinto, who plays Spock in the franchise that started with Abrams, said there were three screenplays in development besides Tarantino's. At the time he was unsure if he would be in the movie, or if Tarantino would find a new cast.

Here's everything we know so far about Quentin Tarantino's "Star Trek" movie:

Tarantino approached Paramount with the idea.

According to Deadline , Tarantino approached Paramount about directing a "Star Trek" movie, Tarantino-style. This typically means blood, violence, cursing, witty dialogue, and a very long running time.

Tarantino worked with Miramax and The Weinstein Company on all his previous films, but he is working with other studios after the allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Harvey Weinstein surfaced in October.

Tarantino will first direct a movie based on the Manson cult.

This means we're unlikely to see his "Star Trek" movie for at least a few years.

His project about the Manson cult has the working title of "Helter Skelter," and it will be released by Sony .

This would be Tarantino's first dive into a franchise — he usually writes and directs screenplays for original stories.

"Jackie Brown" (1997) was based on a novel, but every other movie he's made was an original screenplay.

But Tarantino wouldn't be entering the franchise world without any experience: He has directed episodes of "CSI" and "ER."

J.J. Abrams, who directed 2009's "Star Trek" and 2013's "Star Trek Into Darkness" starring Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, is producing.

According to Deadline , Tarantino approached Abrams about the idea. Abrams, who also directed "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," proposed assembling a team of writers, one of whom would be chosen to write the screenplay for Tarantino's "Star Trek" movie vision. Tarantino has already met with the writers, and the competition is heated.

The frontrunner to write the screenplay is apparently Mark L. Smith, who cowrote the screenplay for "The Revenant."

Deadline reports that Lindsey Beer , Drew Pearce, and Megan Amram are also in the running to write the screenplay.

Beer is credited as a writer on the coming "Godzilla vs. Kong."

Pearce's credits include "Iron Man 3" and the coming "Sherlock Holmes 3."

Amram, who has one of the greatest Twitter accounts of all time , is a writer on "The Good Place," "Silicon Valley," and formerly "Parks and Recreation."

Tarantino has demanded that his "Star Trek" movie be rated R.

Paramount and Abrams agreed to Tarantino's demand.

Most movies of this size stick with a PG-13 rating so more people can see it, since an R rating limits a lot of the audience. "Deadpool," which broke the record in 2016 as the most successful R-rated movie of all time , probably helped Tarantino convince Paramount and Abrams that this concept could work.

Patrick Stewart has always wanted to be in a Tarantino film, so there's a chance he could reprise his iconic role as Jean-Luc Picard.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter after the news of Tarantino's "Star Trek" voyage broke, Stewart said he'd love to return to the franchise if Tarantino were directing:

“One of my dreams is to work with Tarantino. I admire his work so much, and to be in a Tarantino film would give me so much satisfaction. So, if he is going to direct something to do with 'Star Trek' and there was the possibility of dear old Jean-Luc showing up again and doing that for Mr. Tarantino, I would embrace it."

As of April 2018, Zachary Quinto said there were three scripts in development in addition to Tarantino's project.

Quinto told "Entertainment Tonight Canada" in April that he wasn't sure where the franchise was headed, but was looking forward to playing Spock again. This suggests that Quinto and the rest of the current franchise's cast, which includes Chris Pine and Zoe Saldana, could return for Tarantino's version.

But Quinto couldn't confirm anything, besides the fact that there are a few scripts in development for the fourth film in the franchise Abrams started in 2009.

“I feel like we are in a state of anticipation,” Quinto said. “All of us are really excited about the idea of working with Quentin on a Trek film, but I know Simon Pegg and Doug Jung are writing a script and there are another set of writers writing a script. So I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Quinto also mentioned that Tarantino's "Star Trek" project won’t be happening for some time since he's busy working on his next movie , “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood,” which is centered on the murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family.

Main content

Why Quentin Tarantino Abandoned His R-Rated Star Trek Movie Revealed by Screenwriter

Screenwriter Mark L. Smith, who developed the script for Tarantino’s Star Trek movie explains why it was never made.

Quentin Tarantino wanted his legacy as a director to end on a meaningful note, not with a big franchise movie like Star Trek .
Tarantino believes in making just 10 good movies as a director to prevent making mediocre ones.
Tarantino's potential R-rated Star Trek movie would have had his signature edginess and flair, with Pulp Fiction -like violence.

Quentin Tarantino is one of the pickiest directors in Hollywood when it comes to which movies he chooses to put his name to. While we now know that his final film will be The Movie Critic , at one point it seemed possible that an R-rated Star Trek offering could be his curtain call . However, screenwriter Mark L. Smith has revealed Tarantino simply did not want his legacy to be remembered as ending with big franchise movie like Star Trek .

Tarantino has often spoken about his desire to make just 10 good movies as a director. While many directors have gone on to work behind the camera on many more than this, Tarantino’s view is that the more movies he makes, the more likely it is that he will start making movies that are not that great. For this reason, The Movie Critic will be his tenth and final directorial effort before he packs up that side of his role in Hollywood for good.

In a new interview with Collider , The Boys in the Boat screenwriter Smith, explained that he produced a script with Tarantino for a “balls-out” Star Trek movie, but the director abandoned it because he wanted something more meaningful as his final film. Smith said:

"It was a different thing, but this was such a particular different type of story that Quentin wanted to tell with it that it fit my kind of sensibilities. So I wrote that, Quentin and I went back and forth, he was gonna do some stuff on it, and then he started worrying about the number, his kind of unofficial number of films. I remember we were talking, and he goes, 'If I can just wrap my head around the idea that Star Trek could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?' And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk. I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those that I can't ever see happening. But it would be the greatest Star Trek film, not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was just a balls-out kind of thing."

Related: What Happened to Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Movie?

Would an R-Rated Star Trek Movie Work?

In recent years, many franchises that were previously pitched in the PG-13 zone have branched out to cater exclusively to more mature audiences. Rather than “destroying” a franchise as some feared, they have instead become some of the most popular and profitable releases thanks to their clear vision and uncompromising approach to the source material.

This has included Joker, Logan , and Deadpool , all of which outperformed most Marvel and DC movies of the last several years. While Star Trek movies have all sat within the same kind “family-friendly” category that the MCU and DCEU have been occupying, there could certainly be an audience out there for something a little more mature. Expanding on why Tarantino’s Star Trek movie would have been R-rated, Smith added:

"But I think his vision was just to go hard. It was a hard R. It was going to be some Pulp Fiction violence. Not a lot of the language, we saved a couple things for just special characters to kind of drop that into the Star Trek world, but it was just really the edginess and the kind of that Tarantino flair, man, that he was bringing to it. It would have been cool."

Most recently, the Star Trek franchise was brought back to life on the big screen by J.J. Abrams but following the mediocre response to Star Trek Beyond in 2016, the Chris Pine-led series has stalled . While there have been several rumors of a fourth movie being in development, any movement continues to be elusive. Instead, the main future of the Star Trek franchise appears to be back in the medium it began, with several TV shows such as Lower Decks, Starfleet Academy and Section 31 currently in production. Quentin Tarantino’s The Movie Critic is currently expected to be released sometime late in 2024 or early 2025.

The Next Star Trek Movie Is More Important Than Ever After A Huge Announcement

It's been the better part of a decade since the last "Star Trek" film hit the big screen in 2016. Fans dying to see what happens next in the Kelvin timeline have gradually felt their hopes slipping away as rumors of the next installment — including scuttlebutt about an R-rated Quentin Tarantino "Star Trek" film — keep failing to pan out. But according to Variety, Paramount has confirmed plans to move forward with the Kelvin timeline's "final chapter" — and that's just the beginning of the good news for Trekkies. There's reportedly a second feature "Trek" film in the works that's even closer to pre-production. The studio says this film will prove fundamental to the "Star Trek" canon by helping establish the primary timeline's origin story.

The emphasis on the second project's relationship to the primary timeline gives fans even more insight into a storyline hinted at by Deadline in January 2024, when sources teased a tightly guarded plot that would be set decades before the events of the 2009 "Star Trek" movie. Like the Kelvin timeline films, it will be produced by J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot Productions. On track to write it is Seth Grahame-Smith, who penned "Dark Shadows," "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," and "The Lego Batman Movie."

Even more promising is who Paramount brought on to direct the film: Toby Haynes, a director whose resume includes "Andor," "Sherlock," a handful of the very best "Doctor Who" episodes from the Eleventh Doctor's tenure, and the critically lauded "Black Mirror" take on "Star Trek," "U.S.S. Callister." Insiders told Variety the origin film will be in preproduction by the end of 2024.

Even more Trek films could be in the works

The origin film is just one piece of Paramount's big plans to continue growing the "Star Trek" franchise in the coming years, which also include a push for more television movies, starting with the long-awaited "Section 31" story starring Michelle Yeoh. A look at the fandom-divisive darker side of Starfleet that first showed up in the "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" episode "Inquisition," the film will have a decidedly spy-fi flavor that Yeoh compared to "”Mission: Impossible' in space" when speaking with Variety.

With filming already wrapped on the "Section 31" movie, executive producer Alex Kurtzman is more than ready to consider making even more streaming "Star Trek" films. Up for consideration is a follow-up to the "Picard" series. And with all of the "Star Trek" stories currently in production beginning with the 32nd-century-set young adult series "Starfleet Academy," which is currently in its planning phase, who knows where the franchise could be headed?

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Luc Besson Claims He Gave Quentin Tarantino the Idea to Retire After 10 Films: ‘He Copied Me’

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When Quentin Tarantino begins production on his upcoming film “The Movie Critic,” it is expected to mark the fulfillment of his highly publicized pledge to retire after directing 10 movies. Tarantino has long been outspoken about his desire to step away from filmmaking at the top of his game and cited his plan to limit himself to 10 films as a reason he passed on directing an R-rated “Star Trek” movie for Paramount. But while Tarantino’s retirement plans are well-documented, he might not have been the one to come up with the idea.

“What’s funny is that I said that to Tarantino a long time ago,” Besson said of retiring after 10 films. “So, he copied me. No, I was honest when I said that. I said that after [I’d made] like six or seven movies. And it was a way for me to concentrate and say, ‘If I have only 10 bullets, I have to be careful with the last three.’” Related Stories Sex, ‘80s, and Robby Müller: How Two Brits Recreated the American Crime Film in ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ That ‘Challengers’ Threesome Had an ‘Element of Improvisation,’ Says Josh O’Connor, Who Was ‘Not Holding Back’

Besson elaborated on the idea, explaining that he conceived of the retirement plan as a way of forcing himself to turn down lucrative studio offers that he knew would result in uninspired films.

“Because at this time, Hollywood, there was lots of sirens coming to me saying, ‘Here’s the script,’ and the projects that they proposed to me were not bad, but it was sequels — it was the Hollywood machine. And they propose with a lot of money,” he said, explaining that the offers were tempting but artistically unsatisfying. “I don’t want to. I want to stay myself, how to stay pure. So I need to find a way to resist the sirens of these mermaids. And the way I found to do that was to say, ‘I’m going to do 10, so if I have two more films, I can’t do that. I have to do something more like the one I want.’”

“So, maybe I should do one or two more because I still have a lot [to say],” he said. “Well, now I can tell you, I’m going to do three [films] and then I stop. Oh, so we’re done after three here. So, after ‘Dracula,’ there’s two more, and I don’t bother you after that.”

Quentin Tarantino Gives An Update On His Star Trek Film

| June 10, 2019 | By: TrekMovie.com Staff 240 comments so far

Quentin Tarantino is starting to do press for his upcoming film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood . Back in April Tarantino was quoted as saying making the movie is still “ a big possibility ,” and thanks to the press junket for the film, there’s been a bit more talk of his Trek movie.

While chatting with Empire magazine (the latest issue is available now to subscribers, and will be on newsstands later in the week), he was asked about the potential Star Trek movie he had pitched to Bad Robot in 2017 . As previously reported, last year Tarantino’s initial idea was fleshed out into a draft of a script by screenwriter Mark L. Smith. And that’s where it sat, waiting for more action. Tarantino says the next step is for him to give notes on it:

There’s a script that exists for it now, I need to weigh in on it, but haven’t been able to do that yet.

Also not a surprise, and something that’s been brought up before , is that Tarantino would want to make the movie R-rated. The director confirmed this to Empire :

Oh yeah! It’s an R-rated move. If I do it, it’ll be R-rated.

Paramount keen on working with Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino with the Once Upon A Time In Hollywood cast at the Cannes Film Festival.

Tarantino’s film Upon a Time in Hollywood will be released next month, on July 26th. The Oscar-winning writer/director’s recent comments sound like he is interested in taking the next steps to develop his Star Trek movie later in the year. And based on comments from Paramount motion-picture group president Wyck Godfrey in January, the studio is also keen on Tarantino Trek.

Little is known about Tarantino’s Star Trek concept. Reports differ on what characters it would involve, although some of the cast of the Kelvin films have indicated they believe they would be involved, including Karl Urban who has called the concept “ bananas .” Cast members from Star Trek’s prime timeline have also expressed an interest in being involved, including William Shatner , Patrick Stewart , and Jonathan Frakes .

Keep up with all the news on upcoming Trek films at TrekMovie.com.

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thank GOD Trek Thor fell apart

yeah actually i’d rather see this batshit crazy one… but i don’t buy this “the script was bad” thing… thor also made blackhat and 2 snow white movies… he doesn’t have a good track record for what’s good and bad outside of hammer guy

having done bad stuff in the past doesnt mean you have to repeat this mistakes over and over again!

Ghostbusters remake also.

Does Nicholas Cage know that?

This is just a fund raising exercise. It won’t happen.

Did he say the script was BAD though? His quote seemed to me like it was a case of him reading the script and it feeling like a story unworthy of his inclusion– like a cheap excuse to shoehorn him in because he’s famous now.

It may have been a fine script, just not one where he felt he could have contributed anything (ala Chekhov and Scott’s inclusion in Generations).

Movies like Ghostbusters, Black Hat, Snow White, he played characters he felt were either interesting or fun to play, and he was probably sold on an compelling story, even if the films didn’t turn out great.

Also– worth mentioning that actors (and sometimes even directors!) have no idea how good or bad a movie will turn out while they’re filming it. Nobody sets out to make a bad movie, and lots of good scripts become terrible films, and lots of mediocre scripts become good movies.

I think that’s what it is too. With the booming success of the Marvel films (whatever I or anyone might think of their overall quality…) he and his agent/management have to notice and probably have stipulations on what will now get him in a film. How much is he used, how much of a “lead” is he? Pine could’ve easily felt that Capt Kirk was taking a backseat to Daddy Kirk. Maybe there’ll be a STLV story to come out of this sometime in the future.

“Did he say the script was BAD though? His quote seemed to me like it was a case of him reading the script and it feeling like a story unworthy of his inclusion– like a cheap excuse to shoehorn him in because he’s famous now.”

Did anyone else hear ‘unworthy’ in Thor’s voice in their minds? :D

Rush was a good movie

“Rush” was DAMN good. Daniel Bruhl and Chris Hemsworth played worthy opponents in the F1 racing world.

DAMN good indeed.

TBH there were a lot of things ‘shoehorned’ into Generations, I don’t think Checkov and Scotty are top of the list.

He reportedly did say he was not that interested in the script. But more often than not such things are code for “We never agreed on pay”. If I were a betting man I would wager it was more about money than it was script.

It was precisely about Paramount reneging on on their contracted option, and thus opening up renegotiations. This was wholly Paramount’s action which allowed Hemsworth to renegotiate what would be an acceptable script. Demanding the script be twice as good as it was for half the pay is not an unreasonable term.

There was the desire of Paramount to redo the deals that entered into it. But make no mistake. This was very likely only about the money far more than it was about what he thought of the script. I obviously cannot speak for him but I think in all likelihood he wouldn’t have even looked at a spec script or story unless the money was within his window to begin with.

Desire? No, Paramount cancelled the deal. There was more than desire on their part involved.

As for the script, actors do work for scale for great scripts. It is clear 4’s script, whatever its appeal, was not on the level of that.

Some will take less money for what they deem to be more “personal” projects. And there is a possibility CH bailed out for the publicly stated reason. However I think the far greater reason was the money issue. I think it has been made very clear that most of the features CH has done have not been done because he believes they are high quality but because he is receiving a big paycheck. So there is no reason to reasonably think that the script had anything do with him backing out of Trek 4.

Again, I object to you mischaracterizing it as his backing out when Paramount very clearly was the party who did the backing out on a Trek movie production they purposely gave every impression of having greenlit at the BEYOND premiere as is usually done to stoke financial backers, and I might add THEY backed out for their money issues and not the other way around.

I’m not the one mischaracterizing. CH himself publicly said his reason was the script. Not that Paramount backed out. I’m just saying that his recent film decisions I think the true reason is more likely due to salary than anything else.

it probably wasn’t that great. it will more than likely have just been a convenient ‘Generations’y way to include him because the studio will have been blinded by his increasing success in Thor/Avengers (and maybe been influenced with how well the opening to ST09 was)

as for CHs movies – Blackhat was directed by Michael Mann so a no brainer for an actor. Snow White was another live action fairytale (coming after Alice in WLs huge success) and was like a LOTR version of the story so could’ve been a huge success (it did ok) and then he was probably tied to doing an (inferior) sequel. and if we add Ghostbusters..well it was Ghostbusters. from a reasonably successful director so should’ve been a hit right? (but they ignored the one golden rule. NEVER remake a hugely iconic movie unless its like 60 years ago and the film is too old to hold up anymore/theres not been much in the way of sequels keeping it going and all the hard core fans have passed away). MiB4 shouldn’t have that problem as its a continuation but its doubtful it will be anywhere as successful as the previous MiBs (due to no Will Smith)

He seemed to be having a blast in “Ghostbusters” — he has a gift for comedy.

We have no idea what the script was. Could have been awesome. Could have sucked.

We don’t know, of course, but if the script had been truly awesome both actors might have been more willing to accept lower pay. Even big name actors are known to do smaller films if they like the script.

Not a lot of actors out there willing to take role in a movie like Star Trek for less money just because it’s a good script. An indie arthouse film maybe. But actors usually only do that sort of thing to work with acclaimed directors.

You know, like, say, Quentin Tarantino.

its pretty obvious the script mustve been ‘meh’ probably with a few embarrassing weepy cry scenes that Pine and Hemsworth were dreading doing together.. so that in addition to a pay cut = a no thank you from both (otherwise as you say theyd have probably done it. didn’t shatner and nimoy take pay cuts to help get VI made?)

also another underperforming Trek movie (which another lame entry certainly would’ve been) would’ve probably killed any further films. so goodbye the once in a life time chance of being in a Tarantino movie (so Pine might’ve said no to Trek Thor due to that too)

Yes, the specific scenario you invented in your head is plainly obvious.

indeed. We do not need to see Pine falling to his knees in tears upon seeing the mighty Hemsworth (no doubt with long hair/beard and carrying a hammer shaped phaser rifle so paramount get their moneysworth..or Hemsworth!)

Oh man I just want it to be the Kelvin cast. TWOK era. Re-jig The Enterprise A look . Make it a bit closer to TWOK interiors. Those red TWOK uniforms – with a little tweaking. I don’t care if it takes another 2 years. I love that cast and crew and want just one more film with them. Plus make it DARK ( like Where Silence Has lease ) and NO BAD GUY WHO WANTS REVENGE….

Kelvin cast in the TWOK era sounds great, I just don’t want it with Tarantino or R-rated. You can do something thought-provoking and interesting without going super explicit.

I think he’d make it dark and gritty but not sweary.

The sweary bit doesn’t bother me. A little “colorful language” fits perfectly. The issue is that man’s appetite for guts and gore out of THIN AIR. He tends to go fully berserk in his movies from one second to another. Hand him the toys of a space genre movie and he’ll probably turn people inside out enthusiatically… transporter accidents, space vaccum, vaporization FX, alien monsters… space is full of danger and disease wrapped in darkness and silence. Hand that over to a guy like QT and all you’d get is a slaughterhouse in space.

I’m with the “Please Don’t” crowd.

And I’m not excited or intrigued by more ‘bananas’ offerings in the Trek Universe.

I can respect Tarantino as his own thing. I’ve seen his movies.

But I don’t see how they can mesh with the positive forward-looking ethos of Trek.

Just because he is a successful auteur, doesn’t mean he should be given carte blanche to do his concept of Trek.

Especially by a group of Paramount execs who seem to become disconnected from what Trek is.

Either Paramount paid zero attention to how poorly received was the blood and gore in Discovery season 1 by the core Trek audience, OR they believe that somehow a Tarantino movie will somehow make it different.

Don’t forget the ‘shadowy dirty job group’ in Starfleet (the exact name of which escapes me). Tarantino could do a lot with them and still stay in canon.

Section 31. I could see that working out more with qt style. Showing federation missions destabilizing the klingons or romulans, maybe get more gore from the cardassian/bijoran campaigns. Though qts foot fetish might get really weird.

“I can respect Tarantino as his own thing. I’ve seen his movies.”

Well, I’ve seen all of them as well but that’s why I CAN’T respect the man as an artist. I’d hated his stuff long before that first Trek rumor popped up. I would never watch a QT movie in theaters. Low price BD…sure.

I’m not a fan of QT’s work either. Not sure he’s the right fit for Trek. Perhaps as a producer…

QT is a fan of grindhouse splatter but I seriously doubt that’s his intent, i.e. to make grindhouse STAR TREK.

However, STAR TREK has always battled for realism in its science so I can’t see ANY TREK production shying away from portraying realistic medical emergencies, battle or otherwise. If risk is our business, the realistic consequences of that risk must be portrayed accurately if that narrative and its science is to be taken seriously.

yeah and star trek isn’t that type of movie. maybe he should do warhammer 40k or something

Star Trek can be ANYTHING. All genres, all eras, possibilities are endless really. The Star Trek film franchise had become a tired retreat, even though I’ve generally liked most of films myself, even the so called crappier ones.

Now that Star Trek is going full swing on TV again it makes sense to do something much different in the next movie, something different and fresh. It might not work, but it may yet work, and after Beyond, I think it’s worth going for that approach. R Rated could mean anything. It would he interesting what that would look like for a Trek movie. Personally I’d love to see a ‘scary’ thriller/horror Star Trek movie…

a ‘scary’thriller/horror Trek movie could work great as it hasn’t really been done yet (TWOK and FC had some elements but were more action films and TMP certainly had abit but was more 2001 in that approach) and it would be totally in keeping with the early episodes of TOS which all had that eerie TwilightZone in space feel. a lone starship charting a haunted universe of long lost civilisations, the supernatural, and cosmic dread

“R Rated could mean anything.”

Yes, it could. With any other director, possibilities would be endless. It could be chilling Alien-esque horrors, it could be a serious anti-war movie in outer space, it could the long-desired Borg FX freakfest… anything.

But with our little cutie QT, it can only be one thing: a stylish, semi-artsy, pseudo-witty period piece falling apart 70-75 minutes into the movie when QT-pie activates the blood drive out of thin air for no apparent reason. His movies are like Rubber… pointless style-over-substance gorefests of an overgrown Grindhouse fanboy.

Lorca i think you havent seen any Tarrantino film when you think your description is in any way accurate…

Have you seen the second part of kill Bill? Or Jackie Brown? Or Reservoir Dogs? These Films are intense and violent, yes but not a bloodfest nor pointless.

Re “NO BAD GUY WHO WANTS REVENGE”: Just reminding people that Quentin Tarantino seems to enjoy tales of revenge.

I’ll say this, if it’s R rated in the same family of like Crimson Tide, I’ll say lets go for it! I know that’s not popular with a large portion of the base who probably feel it’s the totally wrong way to go but I always felt Crimson Tide was basically a pre TNG Trek film that should’ve been made. If it doesn’t happen, I’ll also be ok. If Star Trek went the route of Star Wars with the anthologies, this is the perfect type of film for that.

You know Tarantino did an uncredited screenplay polish on Crimson Tide, right? Your post seems to understand this, but doesn’t say it outright.

Yeah I’m guessing it was Tarantino that put that whole Trek speech in the script (which was great by the way).

And Silver Surfer stuff, and ENEMY BELOW … the stuff about the black stallions was probably Robert Towne (who also did uncredited rewrite), because he certainly did the ART OF WAR stuff.

I had no idea that Tarantino has any p[art of the writing for Crimson Tide but I am a HUGE, HUGE fan of that movie and often thought of what an amazing “Star Trek” that film could have been; just change the Alabama for a Starship and set it up the same way — wow — that *would* be something!

David Gerrold’s second edition of YESTERDAY’S CHILDREN (not the first edition, the one that is 40 pages longer, and not the kinda-sorta third edition that is STAR WOLF, that is practically a different universe) is kind of CRIMSON TIDE esque, but with a ton more mindgames and some good sf. I was very disappointed the film that was going to be made from it, STARHUNT, never happened, and have spent nearly 40 years thinking about ways to do it myself (not constantly, but probably 20 hours per year, so that’s still pretty obsessive.)

The Star Wolf novels would have made the best-ever Trek-like movies (or television series) if they remained true to the books. Gerrold is a gifted writer who does NOT get enough credit for his contributions to sci-fi.

Robert you share my enthusiasm for sure! It’s exactly what I thought. I could see every scene play out the same way on a starship. Even the combat drill accident.

Yeah I know Tuber. I should’ve flat out said it but I didn’t But yeah, it would just be a cool thing in my opinion.

R-Rated. I shudder at the thought of another “dark” movie, after Nemesis and Into Darkness.

Nemesis and Into Darkness weren’t bad movies because they were “dark” (which I wouldn’t even call them that to begin with). They had their own problems…lol.

Let’s not forget that the “darkest” Trek film is also the best (ie. TWOK). You can’t get any better than that one.

Darkness alone isn’t an issue here. Not even the R-Rating would bother me. The Matrix or the two Alien prequels are R-rated genre flicks but none of them are so sickly over the top on violence as any of those QT movies. That’s because Ridley Scott or the Wachowskis understand the genre they are dealing with whereas QT forces his same old cynical bloodlust on anything he touches. I just dont want that Tribbles episode Klingon-Starfleet brawl playing out the Tarantino way. That guy gives me the creeps…

I totally get where you are coming from Garth Lorca.

Again, I can totally appreciate Tarantino doing his auteur things with his own concepts. And do.

But I don’t want to see QT Trek, and won’t watch it.

For me, his 2-parter as a director on Alias was a turning point that sullied the series for me….And I found myself losing interest in the series after that.

It turned the show into something else that wasn’t what I was watching it for.

Nemesis was dark? Maybe a little moody….

Lol I think you mean ‘dark for Star Trek’…. All the Treks have been very tame really. A 6 year old could easily watch any them. The grimmest moment ever was probably the slug thing in Wrath of Khan, which is actually pretty scary for kids. First Contact is the scariest I think of any of the films so far.

I loved Into Darkness. I can’t wait.

cast – the JJcrew with SLJ as Worfs great grandfather. Kurt Russel as a space crazy Starship commander, Uma Thurman as the Borg Queen. John Travolta as a Klingon warlord. and SHATNER returning as Kirk.

Tarantino Trek end : Kirk Prime (CG deaged 1990s curly haired Shatner) alone on the bridge of the original Enterprise-A sets course into the nexus temporal rift to save the timelines as the JJprise gives cover fire on the Klingon fleet led by General Worf (SLJ)In engineering Kirk sets the Genesis device to explode as Soran (McDowell) suddenly beams aboard from the Klingon ship. they fight and Kirk kicks Soran into the radiation chamber and then beams himself into the nexus seconds before Genesis goes boom and seals the rift forever..

Final scene: Kirk uses the nexus to deage himself to TOS season 1 Kirk and goes back to 1930s New York and hooks up with Edith Keller (1966 Joan Collins)

C’mon, man. In Tarantino Trek Kirk would totally get it on with the Borg Queen before shoving her in the radiation chamber. Edith Keeler wouldn’t even be a footnote.

edited the Borg queen out as it was getting too far fetched

Thank god they serve alcohol in theaters now. It would take a six pack, at a minimum to make this watchable….

don’t forget the bottle of Tequila that I shall pour down your throat. neat. no lemon or salt

With BudLite, the official Paramount endorsed libation of theater going Trekkies, I don’t think it’d take that much, even.

This is the only Trek film that would really interest me at this point. As to an R-rating, why not? Roddenberry would have done it himself if he could have gotten away with it; I heard the man say so in person.

And with the way he was trying to ram ‘casual nudity’ down Wise’s throat (that sounds awful, doesn’t it?) and trying to get Persis to not wear a body stocking, it was clear a “G” rating was as far from what we wanted as you could get.

Sure. GR would have done R-Rated nudity! But would he have done guts and gore violence the way Tarantino does it? I have my doubts…

Ever read GR’s novelization of TMP? The transporter accident is a very hard ‘R’ with organs materializing outside the writhing bodies.

A transporter accident is one thing… sure it would be gory, but that’s just a starting point for QT. Accidents and monster fights are morally irrelevant, the depiction may be gross but that’s it. What Tarantino does “best” is people killing each other gruesomely. It’s his trademark, his very nature. I doubt he’ll change that…

Again, I WANT an R-Rated Trek at some point, but coming from someone else, anyone else, just not QT…

Sounds awesome

We have already seen a naked klingons on Discovery. The movies can’t play it safe anymore.

We also saw twisted, inside-out bodies in Season 1 of Discovery.

I didn’t find them the most objectionable part of season 1, and they weren’t more graphic than the exploding body in TNG’s Contagion, but I don’t think it was a plus.

As you said, to this day, Contagion is probably the most graphic stuff ever done on Star Trek and that was over 30 years ago now. I think people can handle more graphic stuff in Trek, although I know many see it as a family friendly show for the mos part.

Contagion done with modern FX would be fine with me. That would be Alien-esque gore. But it’s Tarantino we’re talking about. It’s not so much the monster FX or transporter accidents I’m worried about, it’s the cynical interhuman(oid) violence. Again, whenever I think about a QT Trek movie, that TOS Tribbles barfight comes to mind, done in a Inglorious Basterds / Django Unchained manner. Yuk…

TOS had topless Tribbles.

why u guys keep calling it Contagion lol.. its Conspiracy

Yeah thanks… for a moment I tought I missed something. Than I thought it´s like on Fashionweek where someone just made some designer up and everyone is pretedning to be very well informed of this fictional designer.

This is how I feel as well TG47, that Disco’s sci-fi horror gore in season 1 [haven’t seen S2] weren’t objectionable and gave the series an added realism that was lacking in the previous series. So in terms of the “world building” aspect of it, I think Tarantino will add a grittiness to the film that not only makes it real but reminds us that adventure is actually terrifying — if it was easy, anyone could do it! But we’re watching heroes on a screen, and it’s larger than life, and being shocked is part of the fun. Also I think people overlook that QT might bring a touch of campiness with him that would probably fit Trek really well. So the gore thing isn’t as important as the overall aesthetic and how it makes us feel.

I’m not too concerned with the movies now that Trek is back on TV, but this could be cool if it ever gets made. I’m not a huge Tarantino fan, but it could be cool to see a Trek that is totally different from the norm.

A Trek that is totally different from the “norm”? Well, if that “norm” is good taste itself, then you’ll be up for a real treat.

I’m not just “not a huge Tarantino fan”, I loath that man and his movies to kingdom come. He maybe a victim of his own childhood viewing habits and he may even have great talent from some people’s POV. But in my humble opinion, that man and his opus is the pinnacle of everything I dislike about movies.

There is not much that could make me say I’d rather have no Trek than bad Trek. QT at the helm is the one single thing that makes me say it! I’d rather have no new Trek movie until the end of my days than having to go through this ordeal.

I agree. I would be keen to see this, purely for the novelty value of an r-rated Trek film.

Disco has recently had a go at doing a different take on ST and I know it hasn’t been too popular with some fans (I haven’t actually seen a single episode of it yet, so can’t comment).

My guess is that (if made) this movie is likely to have a similarly polarising effect. It seems that people tend to either love or hate QT films anyway, so bringing his unique talents to something with such a passionate existing fanbase would certainly be….interesting.

As a one-off I certainly think it would be worth taking a punt on, especially if it was to be the curtain call for the Kelvin crew, whose cast seem so keen on making it.

Oh, and it would be fantastic to see Shatner involved, I bet he’d have an absolute ball with something like this!!

“My guess is that (if made) this movie is likely to have a similarly polarising effect. It seems that people tend to either love or hate QT films anyway, so bringing his unique talents to something with such a passionate existing fanbase would certainly be….interesting.”

You’re right about the polarizing effect this movie would have on the fanbase… but that’s why it should NEVER, under no circumstance, see the light of day. You call that experiment “interesting”, I call it a disaster in the making. It’s a PR warpcore breach that could cripple the franchise for good, ruining the trademark’s good name beyond repair.

It’s the closest thing to handing over Star Trek to the devil in disguise… well… no disguise there. QT may not be the devil but he shows us how he works. His movies are the very antithesis of anything Star Trek has ever stood for. His take on movie making is twisted, cynical and poisonous, a post-modern portrait of human shortcomings. How can a person like this handle Star Trek which is supposed to be the complete opposite?

Garth Lorca,

It is amusing how much fear you seem to believe STAR TREK was meant foment about the devil in its audience.

And, for the record, STAR TREK was NEVER about NOT depicting humans with shortcomings, but depicting them as being more aware of having them and still striving.

Let me get this straight: You are saying that, when it comes to STAR TREK, it is NOT the story that is important to giving it its Trek essence but how far its attempt at realism goes in its portrayal?

So, for you, if QT takes the script for say, Bixby’s DAY OF THE DOVE, and changes nothing, but depicts the creature’s manufactured gorefests (And recall they were total artifice created to exacerbate hate upon which said creature fed.) realistically on screen, it ceases to be a STAR TREK story?!!!

NBC’s Standards and Practices, The National Association of Broadcasters, and the FCC were obstacles to get around and NOT essential partners to getting the show’s scripts to air.

Yeah but it’s only on TV for like two months at a time. Sorry to keep bringing this up but I miss the 20+ episode seasons.

There’s literally no new news in the article

This is years away from getting green lit…..if ever.

It’ll never happen.

it will… look at how marvel started to hire indie directors to make big budget movies.

And Trek is not a kids franchise like star wars. If Tarrantino wants this, this will happen!

you’ll never happen

Well that is clearly wrong, isn’t it?

Yeah, that’s what we need. More Trek that blows up the franchise and leaves it no place to go.

Stop worrying about ‘franchise’ and start hoping for a standalone couple of hours that feature solid story and filmmaking.

na… he is propably a prosumer. Franchises is everything they have.

Hey Blah, yopur name is weirdly accurate

Oh yeah. Bring this on.

Let’s hope he casts Samuel L. Jackson as a Vulcan just so he can say, “Live long and prosper, motherf@#cker!”

Samuel L. Jackson as Sisko.

So…. Still no commitment from Paramount. Apparently the ‘script’ is just a draft. I’ll infer he hasn’t even seen the draft…excuse me, script yet. If I do it??? Nothing to see here, folks, move along. There’s no universe where QT gets a dime more then what it takes to make a character study movie. Ergo, no CGI event movie. Forget about de-aging Shatner, if this happens, enough time will have passed that you’ll need to resurrect him.

Ain’t happening, people.

Tarantino would never use CGI anyway. And he’s retiring after one more movie. He’s going to go out with an old school ’70s and ’80s style blockbuster and remind Hollywood that no visuals in the world can replace storytelling

Tarantino has used CGI in all his recent movies. It may not be as noticeable as in the average sci-fi or fantasy spectacle but he’s not opposed to using it to get what he wants.

He prefers using modelwork, which was on display for the big blowup at the end of BASTERDS, and there is model work in the new one too.

“Ain’t happening, people.” The “expert” has spoken… but havent read QT´s Statement obviously.

QT: “THERE IS A SCRIPT” QT: “I HAVNT GAVE NOTES ON IT YET”

@ Jako….today, details are emerging on Bad Robots pending deal with Warner Media. Not only is it probably the stake through the heart of Trek 4, it’s probably also the end of QT Trek as well.

Told you so…..

If it’s something that helps to continue Trek’s current rise from the abyss from near-death (again), I am all for it.

Um, AJinMoscow how is a wave of new Star Trek TV series anything near an ‘abyss of near-death’?

Star Trek lives with 5 different TV product in the works.

Cinematic Star Trek has always been a touch-and-go proposition. Think of the ‘odd numbered movie curse’ …

I’m with Kurtzman in thinking that, given the vfx possible in modern TV, it’s a real question what cinematic productions can offer above and beyond streaming.

So, why do we need Tarantino to save Star Trek by doing a 180 on the Trek foundation of thoughtful and affirming science fiction and allegory?

Careful! This is “Trek Holy Ground.” If you go “R” then it has to be really good. If you don’t you risk being boring and cookie-cutter-ish

one thing is for sure… there’s going to be more trek movies… i don’t mind them taking time and figuring this stuff out… but when i read articles that it looks like trek movies are over they just make me laugh… trek’s been declared dead more times than i can count and yet keeps on going.

I’m in. Make it. We need a Trek film. And despite the ‘R’ the guy makes great films.

I’m not against either and would love to see it. It it for the best? That is a fair question. Again I am not against it.

Personally I don’t think that Quentin Tarantino should do a star trek film, no offense to the director meant at all, I’m a big fan of pulp fiction, it’s just a lot of his films are bloody and sweary, but then again I haven’t heard the story plot so maybe it’s to soon to judge, however he is a pretty good director and if could tone down the blood and swearing he might actually make a good star trek movie, I’m keeping an open mind,only time will tell I guess.

If QT wins an Oscar for his current movie, there’s even less of a chance of him doing a Trek movie than there is now. He’ll be in demand and allowed to make whatever he wants. Trek won’t be on his radar. Why would it be?

Literally, this won’t happen so long as I’ve got a hole in my arse.

He’s literally been in demand and allowed to make whatever he wants for 20 years.

Well you havent gotten it, dont you.

A Trek Movie is excactly what he wants to do. it was HIS idea…

It is a strangely exciting yet at the same time a one way door.

What, the hole in LeeMar’s arse? If it IS a one way door, what’s the exciting part?

He’s already said that if he’s going to do it, it will be R-rated.

So, there is no expectation of QT holding back on his trademark bloodiness, or explicit torture and degradation.

I enjoy thrillers and pulp too, but I don’t see what they have to do with Trek.

Isn’t Trek affirming the effort to reach for humanity’s better qualities? I don’t see how QT would get at that, he gets too mired down in tantalizing gore and fear.

And if they go down the sensationally bloody and degrading path, language becomes a relatively secondary concern.

Just so we’re clear, no-one is filming my arsehole.

Gee, LeeMar, just have them use a wide angle lens, and it would still be more entertaining than Nemesis!

Just grab a freeze frame of the vger orifices in TMP.

The Temple of Trek is a place I would take off my shoes before I enter.

It would be nice to be able to take the whole FAMILY to.go see another Star Trek movie. But if it’s an “R” Can’t do it!

I’m with you Jim.

Our middle graders love the TV series, and enjoyed all the movies up to Insurrection.

Even the PG-14 ones are not really a family experience.

They haven’t wanted to see Nemesis or the Abrams movies more than once. And one disliked Star Trek 2009 enough that we haven’t watched the last two.

I’m not sure who Paramount thinks will watch the movies in future if they exclude entry the classic Trek 11-17 year-old audience. The proportion of the audience who first watched Trek after 18 is small.

Sadly for my family the last Trek everyone can say they love was First Contact. The last two TNG movies and all the Kelvin films have rated OK to bad. Would love another movie but it would be nice someone thought out the box with them again outside of Uber villain wants to destroy the Federation because revenge.

I hear you Tiger2. Having principal characters formed by the deaths of parents or children is getting old too.

I can say that between the revenge plot driver, and baby Jim Kirk losing his father in the first 5 minutes, one of ours said that they wouldn’t be willing to sit through Star Trek 2009 again.

Our kids are pretty disenchanted with Disney movies that show parents or children dying, and don’t want it from Trek.

@ Tiger2 – if you go back to Trek V, then seven of the last nine movies were wobblers. FC and Trek 09 were good, and there’s an argument to be made that TUC really hasn’t aged well, either.

You assume that teenagers never see R-rated movies. As we all know, in practice, that’s untrue.

Marketing is about hitting enough of a market to be viable, not counting exceptions.

Yes, some teenagers see R rated movies.

And yes our middle graders do see some 14+ movies and TV with us.

But the global or US revenue of ALL Tarantino movies COMBINED doesn’t match the more successful Marvel Universe products.

If it won’t make more profit than beyond, nor will it build the market for future films, what’s the point?

Making an an artistic and entertaining smart movie should be reason enough. Tarantino does that much more often than not. Profit is not all what matters.

Right, teens (and even tweens) do watch R-Rated or MA stuff, but when they do it, they know they’re prematurely peaking onto adult territory (horror, hard action, even p*rn). There’s nothing wrong with that, because that limited “preview” experience helps them to deal with such content later on. If it happens occasionally and under parental guidance, so be it.

But with Trek it’s a totally different beast. Here, the family-friendly franchise would be CHANGED into something else and parents will have a hard time catching up with those changes.

So far, parents have always known Alien and The Punisher were for adults and Trek and Batman were for the whole family. It’s getting a bit difficult lately, mixing and mingling all age content with (near)adult stuff under one franchise roof… Gotham or Titans come to mind. It’s “Batman” but no longer all-age… Tricky, isn’t it?

Loads of parents will just assume it’s kid-friendly because it has the Star Trek name tag on it. It’s one thing if parents take their older kids to R-Rated flicks deliberately because they think they’re mature enough to deal with it. But it’s a different thing if that happens accidentally based on misguided assumptions.

If this movie happens it will be clearly marketed as an R-rated movie by Quentin Tarantino. So it would be gross negligence if any parent accidentally stumbled into this movie with their little kids.

V’ger says no.

Glad to hear this. I had zero interest in seeing the film that was going to go forward with Chris Hemsworth. It just didn’t sound interesting to me…On the other hand a ST film in the hands of a legendary filmmaker like Quentin Tarantino would be amazing and far more commercially viable. A ST film by QT will be a big deal.

This is an absolute no brainer…Get out of the way and let QT do whatever he wants.

Total 100% agree. I have trouble processing any negative opinions on the prospect of a Tarantino Trek film. As you say the man is a filmmaking legend. in the same league as Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese etc. The notion of a Tarantino directed Trek is pant wettingly exciting to anyone who has even just a passing interest in film. and would create a huge amount of interest in the 14th Trek film from even the mainstream media. yet bizarrely there are voices of discontent from the Trek ‘community’. Its fascinating

nasty man, just because someone is an auteur doesn’t mean he’ll produce a good Trek product…

Or even a product that hits the bullseye of unfilled demand.

The wishful thinking in this discussion all has the air of people hoping that jumping the shark will save something that doesn’t really need saving.

Even if it’s ‘good’ in the ideas of the film community, if it’s a financial dud by the current norms of science fiction and fantasy cinematic productions, it will not help the franchise’s viability.

Tarantino has been moderately financially successful in the past, but he wasn’t making an effect heavy Star Trek picture…and with the production values of Discovery, the audience will expect a high standard in the cinema.

I found this new Forbes analysis reasonably insightful…

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2019/06/11/box-office-dark-phoenix-x-men-avengers-star-wars-star-trek-godzilla-jurassic-xxx-alien/amp/

I’ll note again that I don’t dislike Tarantino films, and have seen them even if I’m not panting for them.

And like Forbes and Kurtzman, I have yet to someone really put forward a Trek cinematic concept that has its own place in the market or that wouldn’t work better on streaming video.

The Forbes article suggests that Trek is losing audiences because it’s a Star Wars wannabe and people prefer to watch the real deal. If that’s the case then a Tarantino-lead movie might just help Trek to differentiate itself from that other franchise.

A Tarantino Star Trek movie would probably be the most hated Trek movie of all time.

taking into account Trek V, Insurrection and Nemesis that would be an impressive feat!

Wow, A34 it’s interesting to hear this from you given you’re a solid Discovery supporter.

I really wonder why people think it would have a high return on investment.

Tarantino is controversial enough to have a significant portion of the fanbase stay home, not to mention the families and seniors who wouldn’t come to an R film but compose a big part of the base.

Tarantino isn’t enough of a draw on his own to suggest a high profit margin on a film with expensive vfx and other high sci-fi production values.

I can’t see a good opening weekend or high overseas revenues from this.

Really, the last thing the franchise needs is a divisive and unprofitable cinematic product.

Oh I agree with you.

But I never said I would hate it. I’m not the average Trek fan. Currently my favorite Trek movie is Into Darkness. Wrath of khan can’t hold a light to that movie in my opinion.

I don’t hate any Trek movies, but Generations is the only disk I’d use for a coaster.

I missed off Generations. apologies to all

The Voyage Home deserves the coaster treatment more than any other. Next would be Insurrection and Final Frontier but it isn’t even close.

Nothing new here.

I can imagine this as the ultimate 1960s looking movie. Gerry Finnerman lighting, cool sixties music. Kind of Star Trek meets Barbarella, Danger Diabolik and all those other groovy late 60s films!

See, no offense but that’s what I DON’T want. I don’t like the idea of treating Star Trek like some period piece. It was made that way in the 60s because it was the 60s. But Roddenberry was making a show about the future in his mind and why the movies looked nothing like the show because we were in a different place by then. And its why Roddenberry wanted to do TNG, to refine the look even farther from TOS.

Now don’t get me wrong, if it is a TOS story, I don’t mind seeing aesthetics from that period since that is part of canon. But I don’t want it to feel like some 60s remake either. I still want it to feel as futuristic as possible like the Kelvin movies and Discovery.

I really don’t think KELVIN or DSC look futuristic at all. They just look like everything else right now that has a sci-fi tag slapped on it. Art directing the future has become very generic, even when they have dollars like Marvel does.

Well OK but they don’t like the 60s either thankfully. That would be a HUGE step backwards IMO.

Yeah, you see, part of what attracted be to Star Trek was that it was wild and weirdly lit and had psychedelic music. It’s stories were bold and romantic, with ‘larger than life’ characters and everything felt alien. It was exciting and theatrical in a way no other Star Trek production ever has been (except, to an extent, the cartoons.) I love the idea of the sixties aesthetic. So if that means silver-skinned alien women in unconventionally-cut costumes with go-go boots, lava lamps and disco balls, I’m in! ;) Travelling through space in the original show was wild and fun, as well as dangerous. Tarantino is a terrific stylist with obsessive attention to detail. One only has to look at Kill Bill to see how lovingly he recreated Hong Kong, Japanese and Spaghetti Western styles. If he can distil the storytelling style of the original show and capture the gung-ho, gee-whiz feel of the 60s space opera era, it could be my dream of an ‘ultimate’ TV Star Trek story: the mad, giant size episode I dreamed of when the show captured my imagination as a child!

I understand but it would probably feel like a turn off for most people under 40 IMO. TOS look IS dated, it is no other way to get around it. And is exactly why Abrams and then Fuller didn’t want their projects to fit that look outside a few aesthetics. As I said, Roddenberry himself never went back to that TOS style in the movies and then TNG, which says a lot. And honestly that would feel like a niche movie for only old TOS fans and I’m sure Paramount still wants a wider audience than that. Especially if it ends up being a $100+ million. I’m not saying it can’t any of that but it has to still feel like something that is centuries ahead of us or its going to feel like a joke, especially to science fiction fans.

The funny thing is I remember when Abrams got the job with the first Kelvin movie many people thought he was going to dress it up in a 60s style as well and that obviously didn’t happen.

Turn off people younger than 40? No way. The young audience loved his spaghetti western and blaxploitation style flicks, quite probably the most dated popular movie genres.

yes its possible he would make it closer to TOS in tone (eerie Twilight Zone style horror) and with a similar visual aesthetic. like a period piece. like if GR had done a Trek movie after the series ended in 1969 with similar style of lighting/music/sets/costumes/FX (even down to using model FX over CGI) but all on a 100m budget (so it wouldn’t be ‘Star Trek Continues’). the big screen version of TOS hasn’t really been done before. TMP and the sequels were never really like TOS (esp TMP) and even the JJ movies while they were set in roughly the same era and had the same uniforms they were more like fast paced/lensflare/Michael Bay versions of the original movies 2/3/6 with a dash of the TNG films. (although Trek Beyond was the closest to TOS – a deliberate move for the 50th)

unless hed go more late 70s early 80s and do something similar looking to TMP or TWOK? like if his Trek movie was made back then

Adding a bunch of F-bombs and blood to Trek isn’t going to make it better…

I’m no prude in any way and I will drop F bombs as much as most others but they feel completely out of place in the Star Trek universe. There can be blood but not buckets o’ blood.

Great, another Star Trek I can’t watch with my 10 year old daughter. I was inspired by Star Trek as a boy, but I guess the sex and violence (and associated Ferengi profits) prevalent today in society are more important than inspiring kids.

They produce an animated show extra for your daughter.(For the same Ferengi profits). Why do you complain?

and there is plenty of old trek to show her.

Well, the cool thing about the Trek Universe is that everything is possible. Though the use of time travel, alternate universes/timelines, and parallel dimensions. It could be possible to return Kirk (TOS) now older but alive from another reality, with part of the new crew from the alternate timeline (Kelvin), with some of the willing cast from TNG. Maybe even all of them being hand pick and placed there by Q into a pocket dimension crawling with evil. In an R rated horror film. Heck I would even go pay to see it just out of curiosity.

No R-rated Star Trek. That is just not cool. Ugh. Huge trekkie and I feel this would be a slap in the face as is Discovery… Yuck.

People would flock to see a R-rated Star Trek. Star Trek movies needs to appeal to the general audience. If a R rating makes that happen, then Make it so.

“People will flock…”.

A34 I don’t see the evidence for this.

Why do you think this would pull a bigger general audience when the revenue of all of Tarantino’s films added together is less than a single MU blockbuster.

The first JJ movie did very well the general audience. I was shocked to find out that even my sister who isn’t a fan had seen it in the theater.

When Trek movies starts to pander to the trekkies, that’s when the general audience loses interest.

The superhero movies also had that PG/PG-13 block, then Deadpool came along. Logan made a pile of money. Trek would survive an R rating, as long as it’s a quality product.

Making it R-Rated doesn’t automatically imply huge numbers… yes, it worked for 300, Deadpool, IT or Logan, but there is also Hellboy, Dredd or The Predator… R-Ratings do not translate to huge BO numbers per se, most QT movies aren’t even in that blockbuster territory.

But even if QT Trek succeeds, this comes with a rather hefty price tag. Some people keep saying Trek isn’t kids stuff like Star Wars. So true, but Star Wars isn’t either! It may not be too graphic, but content-wise Star Wars has been about galactic mass murder on an epic scale. Trek tried to emulate that blowing up Vulcan and stuff, but Trek is best at doing more cerebral and optimistic, even utopian stuff.

Now, returning to those roots, THAT would be truly MATURE, not adding more blood, explosion, f-torpedos and tripple boobs. Because after all: who diggs T&A, bloody action and bad languge more than a pubecent 13-year-old? And that’s what QT is: an overgrown 13-year-old fanboy bathing in childhod memories of early 70s grindhouse movies.

I shouldn’t reply to this but here I go. Movies tend to shoot for the PG-13 rating to maximize box office. When films get R’s most will recut to get that PG-13. This is true of tentpole features, that’s for sure. Paramount sees Trek as a Tent pole.

If Tarantino wants to do an R-rated movie and Paramount wants to get Tarantino he will most likely make sure (contractually) that they cannot cut it down to PG-13 without his consent.

True but then the film would not be considered a “tentpole” of any kind. R rated movies CAN make money. But it is not the norm. If it were, there would be a lot more R rated movies out there.

Traditionally, R-rated movies have had a smaller budget because the expectation was that they make less money. However, there have been a number of very successful R-rated movies in recent years so studios may start investing more into those. I guess for Paramount it means that they will have to decide whether they want to get a name director (Tarantino) and take some risk or go for broadest possible appeal with another “safe” PG-13 movie that probably won’t offer anything new.

Recent R rated movies with larger than usual box office. The Hangover. American Sniper. It. Deadpool. That’s about it. Compare that list with PG-13 features box office. Again, not saying R rating is box office death. It obviously isn’t. But a few exceptions is not nearly enough for a studio to put up as a tent pole unless it’s a sequel to an exception like Deadpool 2.

IF Paramount goes with QTs R rated Trek then itd be another comparison to the XMen movies. a one off R rated movie that will probably be a big success (unlike the 4th entry of the ‘Next Gen’ series that’s currently bombing Nemesis style.. coming after the 3rd disappointing entry which came after the 2nd entry which was a huge success due to the time travel plot)

Just going to say that Future Past was not a success because of the time travel plot. It was a success because it was, you know, good. While Apocalypse was, you know…. Not.

@ML31: By no means am I suggesting that PG-13 doesn’t rule at the boxoffice. However, Paramount has tried the PG-13 big tentpole treatment for Trek and it hasn’t delivered what they hoped for. If they just do another PG-13 tentpole in the same vain as the previous movies chances are very high it’s going to underperform again, probably even continue the downward trend of Beyond – especially if it’s made by the same team who did the last three. Getting Tarantino would certainly shake things up, and most people expect he would get a lower budget. So even if it made Into Darkness numbers it would be a better return on investment for Paramount.

Disinvited, I don’t think you are wrong. But I also think that if a QT Trek was done it would likely not have a tent pole budget and certainly would not have tent pole expectations going in. So I would guess that even Beyond type BO would be considered a win in such a scenario.

Regarding Hangover 2, I think I mentioned in my earlier post that the only R rated tentpoles have been sequels to R rated films that ended up doing better than expected.

FWIW, THE HANGOVER 2, also rated R, broke records and proved that an R film’s success could be sustained before DEADPOOL 2.

Consent being the operative word. Every major filmmaker expects that their works will eventually exploit broadcast television exhibition where they know they will be cut for one reason or another.

But it’s not as if QT doesn’t do different cuts for different theater markets, as it is. KILL BILL played a different cut in Japan than in the US where I recall he had to resort to changing scenes to B/W and other tricks to get it down to an R. So, as a matter of general principal, he’s not opposed to cuts (pun intended) to make his works marketable.

Is there a rating beyond R?

NC-17. Which most studios still do their very best to avoid.

Two words: Red Shirts

Poor Zoey Saldana.

She better get that pedicure going…. Tarantino’s in town!!!!

I cant wait to see phazer blasts that explode heads like Scanners and transporter malfunctions that dwarf “The Fly”

Conspiracy and TMP

Ghostbusters reboot, Vacation reboot, maybe Hemsworth is done with reboots.

Was he ever in something that was not a reboot?

I recently watched “Bad Times at the El Royale.” Hemsworth plays the main villain in it. All I can say is… uh, he better hang on to that hammer for as long as he can! Because his talents are limited. More to acting than abs, buddy.

That racing movie by Ron Howard.

Nope. In a few weeks he is in the Men In Black reboot.

He should cast Samuel L Jackson a s Klingon. How do you say m*therf*cker in Klingon?.. Oh.. and cast Uma Thurman as “Spockette” he can make it work.

Spockette? LOL We had that some 10 years ago. Her name was T’Pol and she stripped down to her undies regulary for decon purposes “only”. Gone there, been there, got the catsuit…

“does anybody remember when we were explorers?” https://youtu.be/uDAWjxTxVtU

R rated is practically teenage these days. Deadpool is a 15 certificate here in the UK.

The difference in tone between The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan was basically from U to 15.

I don’t expect the language would be significantly worse, but Tarantino wouldn’t shy away from realistic violence and horror.

Then again… Ceti Eels, bloody injuries, corpses hung upside down with their throats cut and screaming people phasered out of existence… is in stark contrast to the deaths in the previous film, where we feel nothing. Except maybe awe at the FX. At least if you’re shocked, it means you care and so the drama must be working.

TWOK actually was rated 15 ‘uncut’ on VHS. it was cut for the cinema to ensure a PG. Then later when the 12 cert was introduced TWOK was rerated 12 for DVD. (think it was the same for Batman). I thought that was cool at the time to have like an R rated Trek movie (15 is usually equivalent to R stuff like T2, Matrix, Deadpools, Blade Runners and Discovery.. and 12 is like PG13 – all the superhero stuff of past 20 years, Bond, Star Wars, Terminators 4 & 5 etc)

I’m really not getting why explicit gore is viewed as a plus.

The more we see, the more desensitized we become…so more is shocking gore is needed to make us ‘feel something’.

I’m not in a hurry to desensitize teens and preteens whose executive function and cognitive control still have a long way to develop.

Not sure about the US and UK at present, but there is a significant difference between 14+ and R/Adult Content 18+ in Canada.

2 Discovery episodes in Season 1 rated 18+, even though the show targets a 14+ rating. (As does The Orville)

The 90s series are generally PG 8+, but there are a few episodes of Enterprise that have 14+ ratings.

That sort of “desensitizing” has been successfully acieved by shows like GoT and TWD which are regularly watched by every other tween. If those shows negatively influence the cognitive and empathic abilities of an entire generation, we’re quite up for a bright future..

“Canada”…the rating system is for the Anglophone territories… Quebec has 13+ for virtually everything, France and Belgium has 12+ for the same stuff, most Scandinavian countries have 15+ maximum rating… the UK, Germany and Australia/NZ seem to be the only places left that regularly apply 18+ ratings for anything.

So I guess: either those movies aren’t that harmful to older kids after all, or there’ll be street riots and burning churches in those places soon enough…*irony off*

Garth Lorca – desensitization and violence is an issue for children and adolescents.

Ridicule by mentioning extremes of burning churches and riots, is a neat way to avoid the scientific evidence on this that’s pretty well established.

Yes, kids don’t all develop at the same rate, and many can handle pretty extreme things with parental and other adult support and discussion. But many can’t.

I grant that you’re correct about movie ratings being provincial jurisdiction in Canada… so yes that would determine the rating for a Tarantino film.

TV is federal though. The ratings on Quebecois TV isn’t any different.

R would mean the budget will be very low probably $75-100M max. The box office ceiling would be lower as no family audiences like traditional Trek movies. Not sure how Tarantino could make that lower budget stretch as he would want top line FX & decent actors.

Tarantino was prepared to make CASINO ROYALE for 40 million less than 20 years ago, and that was as a period piece I believe! He gets a lot of bang for his buck, but even so, I think they’d give him more money than you suggest. I think an R-rated TREK that was edgy and good would actually bring in more people than it lost, for that matter.

PaUl, I’m with you on this.

I don’t see the R market for Trek being big enough to get a good return on investment.

It’s argued here and elsewhere that Beyond didn’t have a good opening weekend because a good part of the base was turned off by Into Darkness.

It’s not just families with kids. It’s the original adult TOS audience like my mother-in-law who are now in their 70s and 80s. They will make the effort for a new PG Trek, but won’t for an R film.

As well, Forbes argues that when Star Trek goes for war plots rather than character-driven science stories it ends up competing poorly in Star Wars market niche.

Tarantino Trek won’t be Star Wars, but it will be it’s own sub-niche thing attracting his own fans and probably half or less of Trek fans.

Looking at the revenue numbers for the Abrams films and for Tarantino’s films, I don’t see the numbers for profitability on a $150 million production.

At this stage in the whole Trek franchise, I am more than ready to see what Quentin’s ‘bananas’ storyline might entail. Yes, it may involve a mishmash of his favourite Trek characters (whoever they may be), but I doubt it will be a boring journey. As long as it doesn’t involve any kind of ‘revenge’ plot at it’s centre, then I’m good.

With any luck there might even be an exploration of the mysterious cosmos vibe amongst the blood and guts, with some great production design elements along the way.

I’ll no doubt look on it as being set in it’s own self-contained ‘alternate universe’ away from the original TOS show and movies (just as I already do with a lot of the franchise), but I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that the proposed storyline is actually good.

Haven’t most of Tarantino’s movies featured some sort of revenge story? I’m not saying he can’t do anything else but hoping that he will break the string of revenge Trek movies seems counter-intuitive.

Why is QT just giving notes on the script instead of writing it? Is it because Paramount won’t let him? Do we have any information on that?

I don’t think the plan was ever for him to write it completely, just pitch the story. Maybe he’s just too busy or maybe it’s because it’s not his original property. I don’t know. But if he ends up directing then I’m sure he’ll end up having a LOT of input on it.

How likely do we think it is he’ll direct?

From the first reports of the project it was mentioned that Tarantino had a story idea and was working with another writer to develop the script while he made “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”.

You’re jumping to one helluva conclusion there….

I gotta say this is the only Trek thing I’m truely excited for right now. I really hope it happens and Tarantino directs it. It’s so crazy it’s gotta happen. And even if it’s bad could it really be worse than what we have now on CBSAA? I want to look forward to PIC (STP? PCD?) so bad, but deep down I know it’ll just be more of the same from Kurtzman. I really hope I’m wrong though and I’ll give it a chance. That’s another reason I’m looking forward to Tarantino Trek so much is Kurtzman wouldn’t be able to touch it.

what is wrong with you guys… it’s always i dont like new trek… it’s not star trek… then i wont pay for cbsaa… blah blah blah… is it the same core of anti trek fans saying the same thing? disovery is awesome… season 2 was really amazing… short treks really good… chabon’s calypso so beautiful… can’t wait for picard… but i do think it’s best you hang on to your 7 dollars and keep raging on every message board… :)

unhappening

is it the same core of anti trek fans saying the same thing?

I spoke with an old friend a few weeks ago who asked me if I’d seen DSC. I told him that I’d watched the first five episodes of Season 1 and lacked the desire and motivation to watch any more beyond that. He told me, “Well, don’t revisit the series; it’s terrible. The writing is just awful.”

What Zinc Saucier said above sums it up for me. Some people (like Kurtzman) specialize in mundane entertainment. That’s just their style and sensibility, and everything that they produce will be consistently mundane. One can hope against hope that a special exception will materialize, and sometimes it does. But, more often than not, it doesn’t. QT is not one of those people. His movies are typically the opposite of mundane.

Enough already. Trek is supposed to be family friendly entertainment. If you want something otherwise to satiate your somewhat warped desire to see bloody suffering and colourful metaphors, watch something else. Don’t drag Trek into a position to please the forever increasing numbers of brain dead and morally numbed masses! Trek should be above that fad! Short moments of necessary violence when required, sure. But not rejoicing in it for the sake of cheap thrills. Honestly I truly hope this is boycotted. Those that actually want to see this, don’t deny children their right to grow up with a show like Star Trek, due to your purely selfish and immature desires for ‘gritty’ film-making, as you haven’t grown up yet to handle more intellectual fare… Create something else!

Oh please, it’s just one movie. Did R-rated Deadpool and Logan take away X-Men from kids? This won’t change anything.

If you’re really upset about Trek getting turned into mediocre crap for brain dead masses, you should be worried about Alex Kurtzman, not Tarantino.

One Wolverine movie was rated R the rest were PG-13. And Disney Wolverine is likely to be as well.

Also the way Tarantino has talked about being influenced by the episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of this movie is set in an alternate, darker universe/timeline where the Federation has been at war for a long time, thus justifying the R-rating. Again, for the one movie. I also am not a fan of the “dark and gritty” trend seeping into Trek beyond stories where it’s appropriate.

Making an R-rated Trek movie doesn’t deny children the possibility (it’s not a right, it’s an offering) to grow up with a show like Star Trek. All the existing Star Trek shows are still there. Their rating is not influenced by a new movie. Kids can continue to enjoy them. CBS is even developing a Trek show specifically for children. So there will continue to be kid friendly Trek. There may just be some Trek that’s not suited for children. One could very well argue that there already are a number of Trek episodes not suitable for (small) children. The Tarantino movie would just add another entry to that list.

You make a fair point, but I think that ship sailed long ago. I remember being horrified by the Ceti Eel coming out of Chekov’s ear in TWOK, when I first watched it at age 8. I also remember finding TMP kind of scary and disturbing. There’s violence and murder in every Trek movie, with the possible exception of TVH. Now, if what you long for is a TV show like TOS, then I’m all for it. I would agree that, all things being equal, it would be better if a Trek movie didn’t have the more extreme depictions of violence, such as, say, the head-crushing scene in STID. But, all things are not equal. We’ve gone more than 30 years without a really good Trek movie. And TV Trek has yet to fill the bill. So, if what it takes to get some really good Trek is the edgier style of QT, then I’m all for it. Whatever your feelings about it, I don’t think there’s any reason to think that it’s going to affect an entire generation of Trek, being that the QT movie — if it materializes — will probably be a one-off. I have a hard time imagining QT in the Trek-franchise business. He’s too versatile and maverick a filmmaker with too many different interests for that, and it’s just not his style.

Hasn’t he said that he’s only going to do one more movie before retiring? That alone would rule out a QT series of Trek movies.

I haven’t seen or heard that, but it’s terrible news if true. Hopefully, if it is true, it’ll just be a temporary sort of retirement, where he still makes movies but takes longer in between them. It’s hard to imagine someone like QT never making another movie. If you enjoy doing something, and you’re really good at it, and it pays well, why not?

Cher and KISS have both been on multiple farewell tours the last two decades. They are allowed to change their minds….

Does the Bad Robot Paramount deal still end in 2020? Not a long time to get a film into production. I thought Abrams was attached to produce the Tarantino Star Trek.

If I remember correctly Bad Robot has a first-look deal with Paramount that ends at some point in the not too distant future. However, that does NOT mean that Paramount cannot produce a Trek movie together with Bad Robot after that date if they want to. Bad Robot and Paramount can continue their Trek collaboration if both sides are still interested.

I have to say, I’m hugely sceptical. I am by no means a fan of Tarantinos work; to me it is all gory, wierd and over the top.

isn’t ‘weird and over the top’ kind of what TOS was though? and quite a few Trek eps and movies have been pretty gory/borderline R

plus Tarantinos main ‘thing’ is retro pop culture/60s-80s cult stuff/ensemble casts

if anything he seems more appropriate to doing Trek than most!

If the perception is that public tastes have diverged so thoroughly from what made Trek appealing in the first place that we have to drag a Tarantino swear-and-blood-fest into the fold to make it financially palatable, let’s just don’t. For everyone who bemoans what JJ Abrams’ Rebootiverse did to TOS in terms of thematic departure and lens flares for the sake of false drama, I can’t fathom a gore-fest is hardly much more than a slightly altered take on the same different-for-the-sake-of-different concept. Swear-and-gore fests have never been very appealing.

Holden Caulfield thinks this guy is a phony.

Re: Trek Language

I’m not sure where some fans are getting the notion it was the tradition of STAR TREK to steer clear of Standards and Practices’ questioned swear words? The production had to battle the censors challenging its use of “Let’s get the hell out of here.” Fortunately Ellison and Roddenberry convinced them it was a reasonable response to the loss of a loved one that that had transpired in his script.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.” — Harlan Ellison.

indeed it would be like now saying ‘Lets get the F**k out of here’. and the Trek movies have always dabbled in edgy swear words – Trek IIIs ‘Klingon Bastard’ (when ‘bastard’ was a much more naughty/frowned upon word but was no doubt deemed acceptable as Kirk had just been told his son had been killed), Generations ‘ohhh shit!’ (when it wasn’t the norm to have a ‘shit’ in a PG movie the way it is now) and lots of ‘BS’s and ‘shits’ in FC

Yep, and I seem to recall that not only was looking like the devil a fight for the first series but “invoking” the devil in pejorative was included, as well, for the same Bible Belt network qualms, and I seem to recall the line “The devil you say.” came out of Kirk’s mouth too?

That seemed to be a particular bugaboo of the network that Roddenberry really enjoyed picking at.

Waiting for Star Trek by Lars Von Trier. Now that’s weepy R-rated misogyny!

Only if Charlotte Gainsbourg gets a role.

Well, I doubt it could be worse than the bilge JJ Abrams has spewed out!

The Future of ‘Star Trek’: From ‘Starfleet Academy’ to New Movies and Michelle Yeoh, How the 58-Year-Old Franchise Is Planning for the Next Generation of Fans

“I can’t believe I get to play the captain of the Enterprise.”

“Strange New Worlds” is the 12th “Star Trek” TV show since the original series debuted on NBC in 1966, introducing Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a hopeful future for humanity. In the 58 years since, the “Star Trek” galaxy has logged 900 television episodes and 13 feature films, amounting to 668 hours — nearly 28 days — of content to date. Even compared with “Star Wars” and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Star Trek” stands as the only storytelling venture to deliver a single narrative experience for this long across TV and film.

In other words, “Star Trek” is not just a franchise. As Alex Kurtzman , who oversees all “Star Trek” TV production, puts it, “‘Star Trek’ is an institution.”

Without a steady infusion of new blood, though, institutions have a way of fading into oblivion (see soap operas, MySpace, Blockbuster Video). To keep “Star Trek” thriving has meant charting a precarious course to satisfy the fans who have fueled it for decades while also discovering innovative ways to get new audiences on board.

“Doing ‘Star Trek’ means that you have to deliver something that’s entirely familiar and entirely fresh at the same time,” Kurtzman says.

The franchise has certainly weathered its share of fallow periods, most recently after “Nemesis” bombed in theaters in 2002 and UPN canceled “Enterprise” in 2005. It took 12 years for “Star Trek” to return to television with the premiere of “Discovery” in 2017; since then, however, there has been more “Star Trek” on TV than ever: The adventure series “Strange New Worlds,” the animated comedy “Lower Decks” and the kids series “Prodigy” are all in various stages of production, and the serialized thriller “Picard” concluded last year, when it ranked, along with “Strange New Worlds,” among Nielsen’s 10 most-watched streaming original series for multiple weeks. Nearly one in five Paramount+ subscribers in the U.S. is watching at least one “Star Trek” series, according to the company, and more than 50% of fans watching one of the new “Trek” shows also watch at least two others. The new shows air in 200 international markets and are dubbed into 35 languages. As “Discovery” launches its fifth and final season in April, “Star Trek” is in many ways stronger than it’s ever been.

“’Star Trek’s fans have kept it alive more times than seems possible,” says Eugene Roddenberry, Jr., who executive produces the TV series through Roddenberry Entertainment. “While many shows rightfully thank their fans for supporting them, we literally wouldn’t be here without them.”

But the depth of fan devotion to “Star Trek” also belies a curious paradox about its enduring success: “It’s not the largest fan base,” says Akiva Goldsman, “Strange New Worlds” executive producer and co-showrunner. “It’s not ‘Star Wars.’ It’s certainly not Marvel.”

When J.J. Abrams rebooted “Star Trek” in 2009 — with Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Zoe Saldaña playing Kirk, Spock and Uhura — the movie grossed more than any previous “Star Trek” film by a comfortable margin. But neither that film nor its two sequels broke $500 million in global grosses, a hurdle every other top-tier franchise can clear without breaking a sweat.

There’s also the fact that “Star Trek” fans are aging. I ask “The Next Generation” star Jonathan Frakes, who’s acted in or directed more versions of “Star Trek” than any other person alive, how often he meets fans for whom the new “Star Trek” shows are their first. “Of the fans who come to talk to me, I would say very, very few,” he says. “‘Star Trek’ fans, as we know, are very, very, very loyal — and not very young.”

As Stapf puts it: “There’s a tried and true ‘Trek’ fan that is probably going to come to every ‘Star Trek,’ no matter what it is — and we want to expand the universe.”

Every single person I spoke to for this story talked about “Star Trek” with a joyful earnestness as rare in the industry as (nerd alert) a Klingon pacifist.

“When I’m meeting fans, sometimes they’re coming to be confirmed, like I’m kind of a priest,” Ethan Peck says during a break in filming on the “Strange New Worlds” set. He’s in full Spock regalia — pointy ears, severe eyebrows, bowl haircut — and when asked about his earliest memories of “Star Trek,” he stares off into space in what looks like Vulcan contemplation. “I remember being on the playground in second or third grade and doing the Vulcan salute, not really knowing where it came from,” he says. “When I thought of ‘Star Trek,’ I thought of Spock. And now I’m him. It’s crazy.”

To love “Star Trek” is to love abstruse science and cowboy diplomacy, complex moral dilemmas and questions about the meaning of existence. “It’s ultimately a show with the most amazing vision of optimism, I think, ever put on-screen in science fiction,” says Kurtzman, who is 50. “All you need is two minutes on the news to feel hopeless now. ‘Star Trek’ is honestly the best balm you could ever hope for.”

I’m getting a tour of the USS Enterprise from Scotty — or, rather, “Strange New World” production designer Jonathan Lee, who is gushing in his native Scottish burr as we step into the starship’s transporter room. “I got such a buzzer from doing this, I can’t tell you,” he says. “I actually designed four versions of it.”

Lee is especially proud of the walkway he created to run behind the transporter pads — an innovation that allows the production to shoot the characters from a brand-new set of angles as they beam up from a far-flung planet. It’s one of the countless ways that this show has been engineered to be as cinematic as possible, part of Kurtzman’s overall vision to make “Star Trek” on TV feel like “a movie every week.”

Kurtzman’s tenure with “Star Trek” began with co-writing the screenplay for Abrams’ 2009 movie, which was suffused with a fast-paced visual style that was new to the franchise. When CBS Studios approached Kurtzman in the mid-2010s about bringing “Star Trek” back to TV, he knew instinctively that it needed to be just as exciting as that film.

“The scope was so much different than anything we had ever done on ‘Next Gen,’” says Frakes, who’s helmed two feature films with the “Next Generation” cast and directed episodes of almost every live-action “Trek” TV series, including “Discovery” and “Strange New Worlds.” “Every department has the resources to create.”

A new science lab set for Season 3, for example, boasts a transparent floor atop a four-foot pool of water that swirls underneath the central workbench, and the surrounding walls sport a half dozen viewscreens with live schematics custom designed by a six-person team. “I like being able to paint on a really big canvas,” Kurtzman says. “The biggest challenge is always making sure that no matter how big something gets, you’re never losing focus on that tiny little emotional story.”

At this point, is there a genre that “Strange New Worlds” can’t do? “As long as we’re in storytelling that is cogent and sure handed, I’m not sure there is,” Goldsman says with an impish smile. “Could it do Muppets? Sure. Could it do black and white, silent, slapstick? Maybe!”

This approach is also meant to appeal to people who might want to watch “Star Trek” but regard those 668 hours of backstory as an insurmountable burden. “You shouldn’t have to watch a ‘previously on’ to follow our show,” Myers says.

To achieve so many hairpin shifts in tone and setting while maintaining Kurtzman’s cinematic mandate, “Strange New Worlds” has embraced one of the newest innovations in visual effects: virtual production. First popularized on the “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian,” the technology — called the AR wall — involves a towering circular partition of LED screens projecting a highly detailed, computer-generated backdrop. Rather than act against a greenscreen, the actors can see whatever fantastical surroundings their characters are inhabiting, lending a richer level of verisimilitude to the show.

But there is a catch. While the technology is calibrated to maintain a proper sense of three-dimensional perspective through the camera lens, it can be a bit dizzying for anyone standing on the set. “The images on the walls start to move in a way that makes no sense,” says Mount. “You end up having to focus on something that’s right in front of you so you don’t fall down.”

And yet, even as he’s talking about it, Mount can’t help but break into a boyish grin. “Sometimes we call it the holodeck,” he says. In fact, the pathway to the AR wall on the set is dotted with posters of the virtual reality room from “The Next Generation” and the words “Enter Holodeck” in a classic “Trek” font.

“I want to take one of those home with me,” Peck says. Does the AR wall also affect him? “I don’t really get disoriented by it. Spock would not get ill, so I’m Method acting.”

I’m on the set of the “Star Trek” TV movie “Section 31,” seated in an opulent nightclub with a view of a brilliant, swirling nebula, watching Yeoh rehearse with director Olatunde Osunsanmi and her castmates. Originally, the project was announced as a TV series centered on Philippa Georgiou, the semi-reformed tyrant Yeoh originated on “Discovery.” But between COVID delays and the phenomenon of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” there wasn’t room in the veteran actress’s schedule to fit a season of television. Yeoh was undaunted.

“We’d never let go of her,” she says of her character. “I was just blown away by all the different things I could do with her. Honestly, it was like, ‘Let’s just get it done, because I believe in this.’”

If that means nothing to you, don’t worry: The enormity of the revelation that Garrett is being brought back is meant only for fans. If you don’t know who the character is, you’re not missing anything.

“It was always my goal to deliver an entertaining experience that is true to the universe but appeals to newcomers,” says screenwriter Craig Sweeny. “I wanted a low barrier of entry so that anybody could enjoy it.”

Nevertheless, including Garrett on the show is exactly the kind of gasp-worthy detail meant to flood “Star Trek” fans with geeky good feeling.

“You cannot create new fans to the exclusion of old fans,” Kurtzman says. “You must serve your primary fan base first and you must keep them happy. That is one of the most important steps to building new fans.”

On its face, that maxim would make “Section 31” a genuine risk. The titular black-ops organization has been controversial with “Star Trek” fans since it was introduced in the 1990s. “The concept is almost antagonistic to some of the values of ‘Star Trek,’” Sweeny says. But he still saw “Section 31” as an opportunity to broaden what a “Star Trek” project could be while embracing the radical inclusivity at the heart of the franchise’s appeal.

“Famously, there’s a spot for everybody in Roddenberry’s utopia, so I was like, ‘Well, who would be the people who don’t quite fit in?’” he says. “I didn’t want to make the John le Carré version, where you’re in the headquarters and it’s backbiting and shades of gray. I wanted to do the people who were at the edges, out in the field. These are not people who necessarily work together the way you would see on a ‘Star Trek’ bridge.”

For Osunsanmi, who grew up watching “The Next Generation” with his father, it boils down to a simple question: “Is it putting good into the world?” he asks. “Are these characters ultimately putting good into the world? And, taking a step back, are we putting good into the world? Are we inspiring humans watching this to be good? That’s for me what I’ve always admired about ‘Star Trek.’”

Should “Section 31” prove successful, Yeoh says she’s game for a sequel. And Kurtzman is already eyeing more opportunities for TV movies, including a possible follow-up to “Picard.” The franchise’s gung-ho sojourn into streaming movies, however, stands in awkward contrast to the persistent difficulty Paramount Pictures and Abrams’ production company Bad Robot have had making a feature film following 2016’s “Star Trek Beyond” — the longest theaters have gone without a “Star Trek” movie since Paramount started making them.

First, a movie reuniting Pine’s Capt. Kirk with his late father — played in the 2009 “Star Trek” by Chris Hemsworth — fell apart in 2018. Around the same time, Quentin Tarantino publicly flirted with, then walked away from, directing a “Star Trek” movie with a 1930s gangster backdrop. Noah Hawley was well into preproduction on a “Star Trek” movie with a brand-new cast, until then-studio chief Emma Watts abruptly shelved it in 2020. And four months after Abrams announced at Paramount’s 2022 shareholders meeting that his 2009 cast would return for a movie directed by Matt Shakman (“WandaVision”), Shakman left the project to make “The Fantastic Four” for Marvel. (It probably didn’t help that none of the cast had been approached before Abrams made his announcement.)

The studio still intends to make what it’s dubbed the “final chapter” for the Pine-Quinto-Saldaña cast, and Steve Yockey (“The Flight Attendant”) is writing a new draft of the script. Even further along is another prospective “Star Trek” film written by Seth Grahame-Smith (“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”) and to be directed by Toby Haynes (“Andor,” “Black Mirror: USS Callister”) that studio insiders say is on track to start preproduction by the end of the year. That project will serve as an origin story of sorts for the main timeline of the entire franchise. In both cases, the studio is said to be focused on rightsizing the budgets to fit within the clear box office ceiling for “Star Trek” feature films.

Far from complaining, everyone seems to relish the challenge. Visual effects supervisor Jason Zimmerman says that “working with Alex, the references are always at least $100 million movies, if not more, so we just kind of reverse engineer how do we do that without having to spend the same amount of money and time.”

The workload doesn’t seem to faze him either. “Visual effects people are a big, big ‘Star Trek’ fandom,” he says. “You naturally just get all these people who go a little bit above and beyond, and you can’t trade that for anything.”

In one of Kurtzman’s several production offices in Toronto, he and production designer Matthew Davies are scrutinizing a series of concept drawings for the newest “Star Trek” show, “Starfleet Academy.” A bit earlier, they showed me their plans for the series’ central academic atrium, a sprawling, two-story structure that will include a mess hall, amphitheater, trees, catwalks, multiple classrooms and a striking view of the Golden Gate Bridge in a single, contiguous space. To fit it all, they plan to use every inch of Pinewood Toronto’s 45,900 square foot soundstage, the largest in Canada.

But this is a “Star Trek” show, so there do need to be starships, and Kurtzman is discussing with Davies about how one of them should look. The issue is that “Starfleet Academy” is set in the 32nd century, an era so far into the future Kurtzman and his team need to invent much of its design language.

“For me, this design is almost too Klingon,” Kurtzman says. “I want to see the outline and instinctively, on a blink, recognize it as a Federation ship.”

The time period was first introduced on Season 3 of “Discovery,” when the lead character, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), transported the namesake starship and its crew there from the 23rd century. “It was exciting, because every time we would make a decision, we would say, ‘And now that’s canon,’” says Martin-Green.

“We listened to a lot of it,” Kurtzman says. “I think I’ve been able to separate the toxic fandom from really true fans who love ‘Star Trek’ and want you to hear what they have to say about what they would like to see.”

By Season 2, the “Discovery” writers pivoted from its dour, war-torn first season and sent the show on its trajectory 900-plus years into the future. “We had to be very aware of making sure that Spock was in the right place and that Burnham’s existence was explained properly, because she was never mentioned in the original series,” says executive producer and showrunner Michelle Paradise. “What was fun about jumping into the future is that it was very much fresh snow.”

That freedom affords “Starfleet Academy” far more creative latitude while also dramatically reducing how much the show’s target audience of tweens and teens needs to know about “Star Trek” before watching — which puts them on the same footing as the students depicted in the show. “These are kids who’ve never had a red alert before,” Noga Landau, executive producer and co-showrunner, says. “They never had to operate a transporter or be in a phaser fight.”

In the “Starfleet Academy” writers’ room in Secret Hideout’s Santa Monica offices, Kurtzman tells the staff — a mix of “Star Trek” die-hards, part-time fans and total newbies — that he wants to take a 30,000-foot view for a moment. “I think we need to ground in science more throughout the show,” he says, a giant framed photograph of Spock ears just over his shoulder. “The kids need to use science more to solve problems.”

Immediately, one of the writers brightens. “Are you saying we can amp up the techno-babble?” she says. “I’m just excited I get to use my computer science degree.”

After they break for lunch, Kurtzman is asked how much longer he plans to keep making “Star Trek.”

“The minute I fall out of love with it is the minute that it’s not for me anymore. I’m not there yet,” he says. “To be able to build in this universe to tell stories that are fundamentally about optimism and a better future at a time when the world seems to be falling apart — it’s a really powerful place to live every day.”

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‘Star Trek 4' Beams Up New Screenwriter: ‘The Flight Attendant' Co-Creator Steve Yockey (EXCLUSIVE)

Steve Yockey, co-creator of the Max series "The Flight Attendant," is joining Starfleet as the new screenwriter for "Star Trek 4."

Story details remain under a powerful cloaking device, but Paramount Pictures still intends the project to be the final chapter for the cast that rebooted the franchise in movie theaters with 2009's "Star Trek," including Chris Pine (as Capt. James T. Kirk), Zachary Quinto (as Cmdr. Spock), Zoe Saldaña (as Lt. Nyota Uhura), Karl Urban (as Dr. Leonard McCoy), John Cho (as Lt. Hikaru Sulu) and Simon Pegg (as chief engineer Montgomery Scott). ( Variety first reported the news in its cover story on the future of the "Star Trek" franchise.)

Bringing the cast back following 2016's "Star Trek Beyond" has proven trickier for the studio than finding an altruistic Ferengi. At least three previous attempts fell apart for various reasons, most recently with director Matt Shakman ("WandaVision") and screenwriters Lindsey Beer ("Sierra Burgess Is a Loser") and Geneva Robertson-Dworet ("Captain Marvel") that the studio had slated to open in late 2023. When Shakman left the film in 2022 to direct "The Fantastic Four" for Marvel Studios, however, Paramount pulled it from its slate and sent it back to spacedock.

Yockey's involvement is the most promising sign of forward momentum the project has had since. The playwright started his TV writing career on the MTV series "Awkward" and "Scream," before joining the writing staff of "Supernatural" for four seasons. His latest series, the Sandman universe adaptation "Dead Boy Detectives," will premiere on Netflix in April.

Paramount is also developing a separate "Star Trek" project, with writer Seth Grahame-Smith ("Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter") and director by Toby Haynes ("Black Mirror: USS Callister"), that would feature a new cast in a story meant as a kind of origin story for the franchise. A project with screenwriter Kalinda Vazquez ("Fear the Walking Dead") first announced in 2021 also remains in development.

Screen Rant

Why austin butler turned down a top gun: maverick audition for quentin tarantino: “i had to choose”.

Austin Butler had a chance to play Rooster in Top Gun: Maverick, but he turned it down in favor of working with Tarantino, and this is why.

Butler chose working with Quentin Tarantino over auditioning for Top Gun: Maverick, kickstarting his successful career.
His missed opportunity in Top Gun didn't hinder Butler's career, as he landed lead roles in major hits like 'Elvis' and 'Dune: Part Two
Butler eventually played a pilot in 'Masters of the Air,' showing a glimpse of what could have been in 'Top Gun: Maverick.'

Austin Butler has had roles in some impressive movies over the course of his acting career, but he also missed out on auditioning for Top Gun: Maverick in favor of working with Quentin Tarantino. Top Gun: Maverick would have seen Butler as a military pilot training for a dangerous mission under Tom Cruise's Maverick. Butler was originally in the running for a prominent role in the movie, but he ended up turning it down for a smaller part in one of Quentin Tarantino's films instead.

Butler has been acting since he was a child, as he appeared in several kid's television shows like Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide . Despite his success early in life, though, he wasn't guaranteed to be a star as an adult. He often had to make crucial choices to help his career along, and one of those proved to be passing up a role in Top Gun: Maverick . Luckily, Butler's role in Tarantino's movie changed his career for the better and led to a string of massive successes.

Austin Butler's 10 Highest-Rated Movies, According To IMDb

Austin butler chose once upon a time in hollywood over top gun 2 because of tarantino, butler had to pick one or the other, and tarantino won out.

In an interview for the " Happy Sad Confused " podcast via People , Butler said that he had to choose between going to a screen test for Top Gun: Maverick and working on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , and that he chose the latter. Butler turned down the audition because he said it was always his dream to work with director Quentin Tarantino, and when the opportunity finally came up, he couldn't pass it by . He had also met Tarantino before, and Butler ended up securing a small but prominent role as Tex Watson , one of the Manson cultists who tried to kill Brad Pitt's character.

Austin Butler Made The Right Choice Choosing Tarantino Over Top Gun: Maverick

Once upon a time in hollywood jumpstarted butler's career.

While Top Gun: Maverick would have been an excellent step in Butler's career, missing out on the audition wasn't as bad as it seemed. In an interview with Variety , the casting director for Top Gun: Maverick said that Butler would have auditioned for the role of Rooster, which ended up going to Miles Teller, and that he likely wouldn't have gotten the part due to his young age . Meanwhile, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood turned into a major breakout role for him. After working with Tarantino, a whole new wealth of opportunities presented themselves.

His role as Tex helped give him more popularity, which then made it easier to cast him in the titular role for Baz Luhrmann's Elvis , his first major leading role that skyrocketed him to fame. His time as Elvis then caught the attention of Denis Villeneuve, who wanted a "rockstar" to play Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Dune: Part Two , according to an interview with RadioTimes . If he had chosen Top Gun: Maverick instead, which still made over $1.4 billion without him (per Box Office Mojo ), Butler likely would have missed out on joining Dune: Part Two .

Austin Butler Eventually Got To Play A Top Gun-Style Character In 2024

Masters of the air gave butler his own pilot role.

Though he missed out on Top Gun: Maverick , Butler still got a chance to play a military pilot years after he passed on the audition. Butler starred as Major Buck Cleven in Masters of the Air , Apple TV+'s World War II historical drama series, in 2024 . While they may have been set in very different eras, Butler's role as Buck still let him don aviators and sit in a cockpit. His role in Masters of the Air also gives a small glimpse into how Butler could have played the young, cocky, hotshot Rooster in Top Gun: Maverick , though with a much more dramatic tone.

There's also no telling what kind of an impact Top Gun: Maverick could have had on Butler's career. Rooster and Tex Watson were very different roles, and since he likely wouldn't have had the same opportunities as he did from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , his next projects could have been very different. He likely wouldn't have landed a spot in Masters of the Air , as it would have drawn too many comparisons to Rooster. Given the stunning work Austin Butler has done since 2019, it's safe to say that missing out on Top Gun: Maverick was far from a major mistake.

Sources: People , Variety , RadioTimes , Box Office Mojo

Top Gun: Maverick

Top Gun: Maverick is the sequel to the 1986 original film starring Tom Cruise as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, a top-tier pilot in the Navy. Thirty years after the original film's events, Maverick is asked to head up a section of the TOP GUN program to embark on a dangerous mission. Things become personal when the program includes the son of Maverick's late friend, forcing him to confront his past.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which takes place in Los Angeles in 1969, at the height of hippy Hollywood. The two lead characters are Rick Dalton, the former star of a western TV series, and his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth. Both struggle to make it in a Hollywood they don’t recognize anymore, but Rick soon realizes he's the next-door neighbor of the infamous Sharon Tate.

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QUENTIN TARANTINO STAR TREK MOVIE
Everything We Know About Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Movie
Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Movie Is A Piece Of The Action
Here's What Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Movie Is Actually About
Quentin Tarantino is still eyeing an R-Rated 'Star Trek' movie » LIVING
Everything We Know About Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Movie

COMMENTS

Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Movie, Explained
For Quentin Tarantino fans, the news is the latest reminder that the Oscar winner's "Stark Trek" movie remains dead. At least for now. Tarantino fans were sent into a frenzy in late 2017 ...
Everything We Know About Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Movie
Quentin Tarantino Was Making A Star Trek Movie Since the box office underperformance of Star Trek Beyond , the state of the Star Trek movie franchise has been in limbo. There have been several false starts for a fourth movie in the Kelvin timeline, starring Chris Pine in an alternate universe as a young Captain Kirk.
Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Movie & Why It Didn't Happen Explained
Quentin Tarantino's movie would have been based on the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "A Piece of the Action", in which the Enterprise crew discovers a planet with a culture based on 1920s gangsters.Rather than set the movie on a planet that had been inspired by an old history book, Tarantino's Star Trek 4 would have sent Kirk's Enterprise back to 1920s or 30s Chicago.
'It would have been cool': what happened to Quentin Tarantino's Star
N ot so long ago, the idea of Quentin Tarantino making a Star Trek movie seemed as far out as a tribble one day captaining the starship Enterprise. Perhaps that's why QT shelved his long-mooted ...
Why Quentin Tarantino Stark Trek Movie Was Never Made
Quentin Tarantino fans were sent into a frenzy in late 2017 after it was announced that Paramount and " Star Trek " producer J.J. Abrams had accepted Tarantino's pitch for a new "Star Trek ...
Everything We Know About Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Movie
Quentin Tarantino is developing a Star Trek movie - here is everything we know about the project. The franchise has returned to its TV roots with Star Trek: Discovery debuting on CBS All Access earlier this year, but the film branch has been quiet since 2016's Beyond underperformed at the box office.With Paramount looking to again revive the series, and Tarantino's own established interest and ...
Development of Star Trek 4
Director Quentin Tarantino began developing a Star Trek film in December 2017 but chose not to direct the film in January 2020. Tarantino's story was based on the Original Series episode "A Piece of the Action" (1968), which is set on an alien planet with an "Earth-like 1920s gangster culture".
The Untold Truth Of Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Film
One actor who surely didn't upset Quentin Tarantino with his comments is Karl Urban, who played Leonard "Bones" McCoy in the three J.J. Abrams-produced "Star Trek" films. In a 2018 interview with ...
What Happened to Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Movie?
Quentin Tarantino's unrealized Star Trek project sparked innovation and redefined franchise boundaries, leaving a legacy of uncharted potential. Star Trek is one of the most influential franchises ...
Screenwriter Talks About Writers Room For Quentin Tarantino's 'Star
In late 2017 Quentin Tarantino pitched an idea for a Star Trek movie to producer J.J. Abrams and Paramount jumped at the opportunity to work with the Oscar-winning writer/director.
The Truth Behind Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Movie
Speaking with the Edmonton Journal, Pegg opined that the current "Kelvin Timeline" cast might be out of the loop by the time Tarantino's Trek makes its way into production. "Quentin's idea is ...
Screenwriter Reveals Details For Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek
Starting in late 2017, buzz began for a Star Trek movie in development based on a pitch from Quentin Tarantino. Paramount was excited about the idea and Trek vets from Patrick Stewart to William ...
Star Trek: Former Writer Teases Quentin Tarantino's "Balls-Out" Movie
1. Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino plans to make his next movie his final directorial effort, though there was a time when he was considering making a Star Trek movie as his sendoff. Tarantino had ...
Why The Quentin Tarantino Star Trek Movie Never Got Made
Once upon a time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino had a "Star Trek" film in the works.It was likely going to be an R-rated story set in the universe that started back in 1966 with the original ...
Star Trek: We Dodged a Photon Torpedo with Quentin Tarantino's Movie
When the news broke in December 2017 that Quentin Tarantino had approached Paramount Pictures with a pitch for a new Star Trek film, one could hear the collective sound of countless fans' jaws ...
Screenwriter Explains Why Quentin Tarantino Backed Away From His R
Back in 2018, the Oscar-winning writer/director Quentin Tarantino was working with J.J. Abrams on a very different kind of Star Trek movie. The film was based on an idea of Tarantino's and it ...
Star Trek's Kelvin Timeline Could Still Get One More 'Final Chapter' Movie
From "Fargo" and "Legion" showrunner Noah Hawley to Quentin Tarantino, ... latest writer to take a stab at what's simply being called "Star Trek 4" (i.e. the fourth movie set in the "Star Trek ...
Quentin Tarantino Passed On Directing 'Star Trek' Film ...
Quentin Tarantino was close to directing a bloodier Star Trek movie but opted out of making it because he didn't want that to be his last film.. Writer Mark L. Smith is now opening up about the ...
Quentin Tarantino's 'Star Trek' Movie: Everything We Know
Quentin Tarantino is planning to direct a "Star Trek" movie, and his only demand is that it be rated R. Deadline reported in December 2017 that Tarantino pitched an R-rated "Star Trek" movie to ...
Why Quentin Tarantino Abandoned His R-Rated Star Trek Movie Revealed by
Quentin Tarantino wanted his legacy as a director to end on a meaningful note, not with a big franchise movie like Star Trek.; Tarantino believes in making just 10 good movies as a director to ...
Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek Movie Would've Had A Gangster Vibe
Acclaimed filmmaker Quentin Tarantino's abandoned Star Trek movie would've had a gangster vibe to it. For several years beginning in 2017, fans of both Star Trek and Tarantino thought they'd hit the jackpot. The notoriously violent and creative writer/director had made it clear that he was strongly considering making a Star Trek film.With his huge range of TV and film knowledge, as well ...
Writer says that Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek ideas were 'wonderful'
Most movie and TV fans are familiar with the fact that Quentin Tarantino had plans to direct a Star Trek movie back in 2017. He pitched JJ Abrams a - unsurprisingly - R-rated idea, and he wanted to bring Patrick Stewart and William Shatner along for the ride. While that didn't end up happening ...
The Next Star Trek Movie Is More Important Than Ever After A Huge
The origin film is just one piece of Paramount's big plans to continue growing the "Star Trek" franchise in the coming years, which also include a push for more television movies, starting with ...
Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek movie would be amazing, and I need it
What Star Trek is really lacking, however, is the use of the word 'motherfucker,' and I'm only half joking. Quentin Tarantino, one of the best directors of the modern era, is famed for his profane and violent films, but he is also a masterful storyteller. He's made some of the best movies of all time, but still has something on his bucket list that needs ticking off: he needs to make a ...
Luc Besson on Quentin Tarantino Retiring After 10 Movies
Luc Besson claims he gave Quentin Tarantino the idea of ... at the top of his game and cited his plan to limit himself to 10 films as a reason he passed on directing an R-rated "Star Trek ...
Quentin Tarantino Gives An Update On His Star Trek Film
cast at the Cannes Film Festival. Tarantino's film Upon a Time in Hollywood will be released next month, on July 26th. The Oscar-winning writer/director's recent comments sound like he is ...
Star Trek's Future: 'Starfleet Academy,' 'Section 31,' Michelle Yeoh
Around the same time, Quentin Tarantino publicly flirted with, then walked away from, directing a "Star Trek" movie with a 1930s gangster backdrop. Noah Hawley was well into preproduction on a ...
'Star Trek 4' Beams Up New Screenwriter: 'The Flight Attendant' Co
Steve Yockey, co-creator of the Max series "The Flight Attendant," is joining Starfleet as the new screenwriter for "Star Trek 4." Story details remain under a powerful cloaking device ...
Why Austin Butler Turned Down A Top Gun: Maverick Audition For Quentin
Austin Butler has had roles in some impressive movies over the course of his acting career, but he also missed out on auditioning for Top Gun: Maverick in favor of working with Quentin Tarantino.Top Gun: Maverick would have seen Butler as a military pilot training for a dangerous mission under Tom Cruise's Maverick. Butler was originally in the running for a prominent role in the movie, but he ...