For the past five years, the Star Trek movie franchise has been stuck in Generations’ Nexus, so to say, following Star Trek Beyond’s underwhelming commercial performance. But last week, it was announced that Paramount had finally said “engage” on a new movie for the property from some fresh talent, Star Trek: Discovery writer Kalinda Vazquez. And aside from that, we’ve just learned of an additional idea that was pitched to Paramount.
No other writer has his name on as many beloved Star Trek movies than Nicholas Meyer, the 75-year-old scribe of 1982’s The Wrath of Khan, 1986’s The Voyage Home and 1991’s The Undiscovered Country. Meyer was an important voice in adapting the popular original Star Trek crew to the big screen after the franchise’s first film in 1979 let down many fans. Meyer reportedly isn’t content with being done with the franchise yet. As he told TrekMovie:
My partner Steven-Charles Jaffe and I wrote a whole treatment and plan for a Star Trek feature film. We didn’t write a whole script. We wrote a very detailed treatment and a whole pitch doc with illustrations. It's a very comprehensive thing. And we first we took it to Alex Kurtzman, then we took it to J.J. [Abrams], and then we took it to Emma Watts at Paramount.
During the interview, Nicholas Meyer said that the pitch happened within the last year, but he has yet to hear back from the studio about the movie being greenlit. That said, he’s still excited about the project if it does get attention from the studio, explaining further:
It was a detailed proposal for what could have been a film, or it could have been a series, or it could have been a film leading to a series or a series leading to a film… It could be a series of films.
It should also be noted that this pitch was an independent story for Star Trek that would be “based on holes in the chronology” and allow for some “original material” to come out of the property. In other words, Meyer and his writing partner Steven-Charles Jaffe were thinking outside the box from Captain Kirk and his crew, and their idea could dive into something we’ve yet to see from the franchise.
It’s exciting to hear about old Star Trek blood providing Paramount with something new, but it’s all too vague for us to really know whether we’d actually be excited about it and if it may actually happen. Emma Watts was just named the new film chief of the studio over the summer, and has reportedly been tasked with figuring out what to do with Star Trek on the film front.
So far, as of last week, we know that Kalinda Vazquez has an idea in development to continue the franchise somehow, and there’s riches of Star Trek projects we’ve heard about over the last couple of years that seem to be moving in slow motion or sitting on a shelf. There was famously an R-rated continuation of the series by The Revenant’s Mark L. Smith that Quentin Tarantino was attached to direct; Fargo and Legion creator Noah Hawley had a script calling for a new cast; and there was the initial Star Trek 4 idea involving time travel and Chris Hemsworth that fell through due to contract issues.
Paramount could theoretically pursue a number of cinematic Star Trek projects, including the one from the writers of Wrath of Khan, but we’ll have to wait and see!
