The late 2017 announcement that Quentin Tarantino had successfully pitched a concept for a new Star Trek movie took pretty much everyone by surprise, with the director’s violent, no-holds-barred style feeling like an odd fit for the (relatively) squeaky clean, utopian Trek universe.
There’s been no mention of any plot or casting details for this new and R-rated pic – a franchise first, no less – but make no mistake, it will be rated R, presumably for violence and Tarantino’s tendency to scatter a few hundred F-bombs throughout his script. Beyond that, we wouldn’t be surprised to see some nudity thrown in there as well.
But when can audiences expect the project to take flight? Well, there’s no launch window just yet and according to Simon Pegg, given how busy the director is at the moment, it could be 5 or 6 years before he gets around to making his Star Trek film.
“He’s going to be so busy with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that I can’t see him doing it for five or six years, by which time we might be too old [to appear in it] anyway.”
Though Pegg may be stretching things a bit here, it’s definitely going to be at least a couple of years before QT gets going on the pic, which means there’s a very good chance that Paramount will fast-track the fourth Star Trek film from S.J. Clarkson in the meantime, who’s about to become the first female director to take control of a live-action movie in the franchise.
As for Tarantino’s project, well, we know that William Shatner, John Cho and the great Patrick Stewart (X-Men), among many others, have all voiced their support of his bold new direction for the series, meaning the filmmaker’s probably got something pretty special cooked up for Star Trek fans. We just hope it won’t be 5 or 6 years before we get to see what it is.