After much uncertainty, a period when countless feature-length Star Trek projects floated around aimlessly in the depths of development hell, we now know for certain that two separate blockbusters will be going boldly where many others have gone before; straight to the big screen. Or at least we think they are, with Paramount+ still an option that’s very much on the table.
One will be written by Discovery scribe Kalinda Vasquez, but there’s also another film that’s been penciled in for a June 2023 release in theaters. That’s the extent of the information we have, though, other than both of them being produced by J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot.
Of course, for a while, it looked like a straight shootout between the canonical Star Trek 4 and Noah Hawley’s mysterious reboot in the race to get into production first, and in a new interview, the Legion and Fargo showrunner offered up some details about just how close his Trek was to shooting before the plug was abruptly pulled.
“We were on the runway. There was major casting that we were in the middle of. We had a production schedule and I was getting ready to go to Australia. And then, as you said, new management. I guess in retrospect, what surprised me is not that Emma Watts came in and said, ‘Are you people crazy? This is a this is an untested crew. This is an original idea. We don’t know if this is going to work or not work’. It’s that I got as far as I did. It was a really fun movie and I think it would have been a great film, but you can’t control these things. So we move on.”
From the sound of things, it was new Paramount boss Emma Watts’ apprehension over rebooting one of the studio’s biggest brands with an original concept that saw Hawley’s vision abandoned on short notice, which nearly sums up the way the industry works these days in a microcosm.
Hawley was only brought on to Star Trek in the first place after the Kelvin timeline had stalled, with Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth both backing out at different points, leading to the most uncertainty the theatrical adventures of the Enterprise crew had faced since they spent years in exile after The Next Generation gang made their exit in Nemesis. On the plus side, Hawley almost immediately jumped into Hulu’s Alien series with Ridley Scott, so at least he’s still working in the realms of sci-fi.