It's been a long time since Star Trek had a movie in theaters, though it's not for a lack of trying. Paramount had several false starts over the past decade as it tried to get a film made, and when it finally had a chance to make it happen in 2025, Section 31 was made available with a Paramount+ subscription. There was also a movie from director Noah Hawley that almost happened, but it could've been derailed by a comment involving Chris Pine.
Hawley made waves on the 2025 TV schedule after his series, Alien: Earth, was released by FX. And after watching that show, I wrote about how it bummed me out that his Trek movie didn't work out. Now, in an interview with the SFF Gazette, he laid out just how close it was to happening before it was called off completely:
I signed on, you know, after 'Lucy in the Sky'; I thought, 'Oh, I like this movie thing. I’d like to do another one, but I think maybe I’d like to try something a little bigger.' I went in, I talked to Paramount, I sold them this original idea. It wasn’t Chris Pine, it wasn’t anything. I wrote it, they said, 'We love it, let’s prep it...'
It's wild to hear this story now, with the context being that the movie ultimately didn't happen. It's also painful for me personally, because of how much I loved Alien: Earth and can only imagine how Hawley would've crushed it with a Star Trek story.
As it turns out, Noah Hawley's Trek idea got a lot further in the process than I assumed. The director revealed he was in the process of securing shooting locations when a change of staff put the progress to a grinding halt:
I was going to move to Australia. We were booking stages. And then, as happens in Hollywood, Jim Gianopulos, who was running the studio at the time, he’s like, 'I’m going to bring in somebody else under me, and they’re going to take over the film studio. And the first thing they did was kill the original 'Star Trek' movie because they said, 'Well, how do we know people are going to like it?'
It's comments like this that offer some context as to why Star Trek's fourth Kelvin movie was stuck in development hell for so long. Paramount has balked at the opportunity to bring the franchise back to theaters a couple of times, despite several attempts to make it happen. This included an origin movie that was greenlit after Noah Hawley's was shot down, which we haven't heard a meaningful update on since.
This brings us to the present, in which Paramount Skydance has enlisted John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein to write a new Trek movie entirely separate from previous shows and movies. It's ironic, considering Noah Hawley's following comment about Chris Pine might've been what killed his movie:
Like, you know, 'Shouldn’t we do a transition movie from Chris Pine[’s cast], play it safe, you know, whatever?' And so it kind of went away.
Hearing that makes me want to bang my head against a wall, because I would've killed to see Noah Hawley's vision for Star Trek. Instead, Paramount let him go, and now, six years later, they're moving forward with the same direction he suggested years ago.
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Of course, six years ago, there was still hope alive in the Star Trek fandom that Chris Pine and the rest of the Kelvin crew would be able to get together and do a fourth movie. However, in 2025, Chris Pine is as busy as ever, Zoë Saldana is about to release an Avatar movie, Zachary Quinto has NBC's Brilliant Minds, Karl Urban is wrapping up the final season of The Boys, and Simon Pegg is doing a bit of everything.
It's easy to see why Paramount Skydance opted to move on from the idea of a fourth Kelvin film happening, rather than try to pull that extremely busy group of actors together. If only they'd seen that back when Noah Hawley had a Trek script and was ready to shoot in Australia, but I guess there's no crying over spilled milk from a replicator.
Here's hoping we get a Star Trek movie filming before the end of 2026, or at least concrete plans for a date to start production! It's stories like these that make me cautious about theatrical plans for this franchise; however, maybe this time, we'll actually get to see a new story on the big screen.
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