Just when you thought the future of Star Trek on the big screen couldn’t get any murkier, Paramount announced that the next feature-length installment in the long-running sci-fi franchise will arrive in June 2023. While that’s fairly innocuous in itself, reports began circulating shortly afterwards that it won’t be the project announced last month that’s got Discovery scribe Kalinda Vasquez on scripting duties, but it will be produced by J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot outfit nonetheless.
We can now add that to the list of Star Trek pics floating around in the developmental ether along with Vasquez’s movie, Quentin Tarantino’s R-rated effort, Noah Hawley’s planned reboot that was shelved before he jumped ship to Hulu’s Alien series and, of course, the canonical fourth installment in the Kelvin timeline that would reunite Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, John Cho and the rest of the gang.
Star Trek 4 has come perilously close to getting made on several occasions in the past, with Chris Hemsworth once set to return as George Kirk before dropping out, while Pine even walked away at one stage but was eventually convinced to return. Indeed, on the small screen the brand is thriving, but the theatrical side of things just keeps hitting bumps in the road.
However, in a new interview, Quinto once again reaffirmed his desire to get the band back together for Star Trek 4, but he seems to be in the dark just as much as the rest of us are.
“Honestly, I have no real idea what’s going on with Star Trek. But we all love each other and we all love that experience and I’m sure if it comes back around and we’re all available, I’m sure we’d be happy to jump back on board. No pun intended. But I don’t know, that’s in other people’s hands and I know I, for one, have had sort of moved on in terms of any kind of expectations, but you never know things come back in surprising ways and it’s surprising times, and it could be fun if it happens.”
Now that a release date has been locked in, at least we know that there’s a new Star Trek movie coming in two years, but we’ll just have to wait and see what form it ultimately ends up taking.