Following the release of “Star Trek Beyond” almost a decade ago, Paramount has struggled with what to do with the film portion of its “Star Trek” franchise.
Several different incarnations were said to be in development at one point – some serving as a fourth adventure of the Chris Pine-led cast, others were originals. One of those originals came from “Fargo” and “Alien: Earth” creator Noah Hawley.
Hawley’s take was said to be a standalone entry, not connected to the previous films, and to feature all-new characters. It also dealt with a “virus that wipes out vast parts of the known universe”.
Appearing on a new episode of the SmartLess podcast this week, Hawley spoke about what happened and revealed just how far the project had progressed before it was shut down:
“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. You know it’s all franchises, and I thought, yeah, but everything’s war, right? ‘Star Wars’ is war, and Marvel is war. But ‘Star Trek’ isn’t war. ‘Star Trek’ is exploration, right? It’s people solving problems by being smarter than the other guy.”
He cites the moment from “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” where William Shatner’s Kirk puts on his reading glasses and lowers the shields on the other ship, as the best moment from the film and emblematic of the approach he wanted to take. The studio was onboard… at least until an executive regime change:
“So 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.’ We were, you know, we were… I was going to move to Australia, we were booking stages, whatever…
And then, you know, 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?’ 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.”
He adds that his desire to do the project hasn’t entirely gone: “I mean, I talked to David Ellison recently. And I was like, ‘You still haven’t made a ‘Star Trek’ movie. I’m just saying it’s in there. I love it.’”
Paramount’s Ellison has indicated in recent months that his studio is keen to bring “Star Trek” back to the cinema, but in what form is unclear beyond it not being one with Chris Pine’s Kirk and his crew.
