Paramount Pictures still doesn’t seem to know what to do with the “Star Trek” franchise on film.
We’re nine years removed from 2016’s “Star Trek Beyond” – the biggest gap ever between Trek movies since the films began with “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” way back in 1979, and there’s no sign of a new theatrical film in sight.
We did get a new movie earlier this year with the direct-to-streaming “Star Trek: Section 31,” the Michelle Yeoh-led telemovie drawing some of the worst reviews for any film this year and by far the worst reviews for the franchise to date.
On the actual big screen front, there’d been talk of a fourth film set within the Kelvin Timeline, but it doesn’t appear to have progressed. At one point, Quentin Tarantino famously planned an R-rated, gangster-themed Trek film before ultimately abandoning the project.
Tarantino and Mark L. Smith got as far as writing a script, but the filmmaker then walked away from the idea after not wanting to end his ‘ten film plan’ with a franchise feature. One person who did apparently get to hear a breakdown of it is Simon Pegg, the actor who plays Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott.
Appearing at Fan Expo Boston on Saturday, Pegg said J.J. Abrams and producer Lindsey Weber once walked him through the plot of Tarantino’s film. He explains to Collider:
“That was what we call in the business bats–t crazy. It was everything you would expect a Quentin Tarantino Star Trek script to be. I think it would have been such an incredible sort of curio to see Star Trek through his lens. I don’t know how it would have gone over with the fans, but it certainly would have been an interesting thing.”
The story was reportedly set to unfold on an Earth-like world stuck in a 1930s gangster era, akin to the “Star Trek: The Original Series” episode “A Piece of the Action” where the crew visits a planet modelled after mob culture.
A rumor cropped up earlier this weekend that Tarantino’s next directorial effort would shoot this December, but the report has subsequently been shot down with Tarantino still said to be a long way from a working script.
