It’s a decade since Star Trek Beyond, but as the franchise toasts its 60th anniversary, there’s no new film is on the horizon. We look at the twists and turns so far… Many in the Star Trek fan community would agree that it’s really a small screen franchise. Created by Gene Roddenberry, it was born ... Star Trek Beyond | 10 years on, where does the film franchise go next?
It’s a decade since Star Trek Beyond, but as the franchise toasts its 60th anniversary, there’s no new film is on the horizon. We look at the twists and turns so far…
Many in the Star Trek fan community would agree that it’s really a small screen franchise. Created by Gene Roddenberry, it was born on TV in 1966. Its creative high points have mostly been on TV. And over the last decade, we’ve seen what could be called the third age of Star Trek on television.
To ignore the cinematic side of the franchise would be doing it a disservice, however. The Motion Picture revived Captain (sorry Admiral) James T Kirk and a revamped Enterprise in 1979, launching a six film series of adventures that turned a beloved cult show into a global property. We’ve also seen two different series of characters in two different screen universes keep the cinematic flame burning, through high points and low.
Never, however, have we seen such a gulf between movie outings as we have since 2016’s Star Trek Beyond and now. While a fun throw back to The Original Series, it was a strangely small scale affair given it coincided with the 50th anniversary of Star Trek. Outside North America, it didn’t see anywhere near the same box office returns enjoyed by JJ Abrams’ previous films, 2009’s Star Trek and sequel Star Trek Into Darkness.
A year later, the small screen stole its thunder, as Star Trek Discovery became the streaming-era approach that launched half dozen ships under the aegis of showrunner Alex Kurtzman. Since 2017, we’ve seen a whole new TV era of Star Trek unfold over the course of roughly 200 episodes. Even that now seems to be ending, though, and threatens to plunge the franchise into a new Dark Age.
Some wonder now if Star Trek’s hope lies on the big screen again, as it did in 1979. Yet 10 years after Star Trek Beyond, there’s no movie to mark the show’s 60th anniversary.
Why? The answer lies in the succession of failed ideas and false dawns we’ve heard about since 2016. And there have been plenty…
Star Trek 4
The logical move after Beyond arrived was to plan for a fourth outing for the Chris Pine-led revival crew of the original characters. Though never capturing quite the same magic of the 60s cast, the modern incarnations did both a more than decent turn in pastiche while crafting their own unique takes on these immortal creations.
Development on Star Trek 4 began early, with JD Payne and Patrick McKay (who later became the scions of Amazon’s ambitious TV take on The Lord Of The Rings) announced as screenwriters before Beyond had even released. (Payne and McKay previousy did uncredited work on Beyond's script.
Now a producer, Abrams declared that Chris Hemsworth would return as Kirk’s father George, killed off in the original film (before Hemsworth found fame with Thor), in an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade inspired father-son adventure narrative.
It all seemed to be heading toward a greenlight, despite the main cast not being contractually locked down. With a completed screenplay, Paramount sought out director in SJ Clarkson to take charge, and pre-production appeared to be going ahead in 2018. Jennifer Morrison, who played Kirk’s mother Winona in the original film, expressed how she too wanted to return. Shooting looked set to begin in early 2019.
Then came an unsurmountable road block. Pine and Hemsworth dropped out following contract negotiations, and a rumoured intent by Paramount to lower the budget after Beyond’s lacklustre performance.
Despite the absence of Captain Kirk, which is a bit like making the original Star Wars without Han Solo, Paramount initially wanted to press on tying up everyone else in contracts. But once it became clear that Pine and Hemsworth were truly done, Clarkson was let go and Payne/McKay’s script (which Hemsworth reputedly also didn’t like) was dumped. And while this isn’t quite the last we’ll hear of the ‘Kelvin Timeline’ in this story, Paramount was having its head turned by a cinematic heavyweight…
Tarantino’s Star Trek
Perhaps the most famous director of the second half of the 20th century, Quentin Tarantino briefly considered making a Star Trek movie around 2017.
Though it sounded far fetched, Tarantino’s obsession with mid-20th century Americana has fuelled the majority of his original work, allowing him to borrow from a range of different genres for his mash ups, revisionist takes and, for some, rip-offs. He’s never made a sci-fi movie, but Tarantino appears steeped in an awareness of Star Trek lore, certainly of the original period.
Hence why his idea revolved around adapting a 60s episode, A Piece Of The Action, which saw the USS Enterprise discover a planet where the inhabitants mimicked the 1920s gangster era. Multiple writers were drafted in to pen the project, with The Revenant scribe Mark E Smith working up an R-rated screenplay with the Bad Robot Abrams stable of producers. Tarantino’s take wasn’t going to be set in the rebooted Kelvin timeline, thought it would likely have featured Kirk, Spock and other original series characters.
Ultimately, Tarantino’s self-styled “Pulp Fiction in space” folded in 2019 as he focused on his latest film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. It sounds like it would have been a bizarre melange of elements – 60s Star Trek, Pine and Zachary Quinto in the two iconic roles despite playing different versions of the characters (Tarantino didn’t like the way Star Trek 2009 had rebooted the series in timey-wimey fashion). Smith suggested that it would propel Star Trek into a new creative arena as the MCU had done.
Fascinating though a Tarantino Star Trek movie would have been, it probably would have further complicated an already knotty franchise. In the wake of the pandemic, attention began to turn to other creatives who might go where no Star Trek film had gone before…
A crew of creatives
As 2019 gave way to 2020, everyone seemed to want a go at Star Trek 4. Star Trek II producer Robert Sallin had a script, as did the film’s director Nicholas Meyer (who eventually wrote an audio prequel to The Wrath Of Khan called, imaginatively, Star Trek: Khan). The most promising name attached to Star Trek at that stage was Noah Hawley.
The celebrated writer, producer and director of X-Men take Legion and the anthology TV version of Fargo, Hawley developed a script based around original characters, which no producer had been brave enough to try. Though development came close enough to interest both Cate Blanchett and Rami Malek, Hawley’s idea, focused around a galactic pandemic, struck too close to home for comfort, and his version was shelved. He ultimately scratched his sci-fi itch with Alien: Earth.
Matt Shakman was the next big name to step into the ring. After directorial success with Marvel’s WandaVision, he became attached in 2021 and a release date was even set: June 9th 2023.
Alas, Shakman’s version, worked on by writers including Captain Marvel scribe Geneva Robertson-Dworet, hit several bumps. Paramount announced its intention to bring back Pine and company, despite Pine frequently claiming he hadn’t seen a script or negotiated any contract, as had none of the cast around him.
Script details eventually saw this latest project run aground, despite cast members being hired and soundstages prepped to film in 2022. Indeed, story details are the one missing element in Shakman’s take on the franchise. He has always refused to discuss too much, believing his version of the film might still get made, despite him moving on to direct Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Still, Shakman arguably came closer than anyone to actually mounting a post-Beyond film.
Various subsequent approaches were mooted in 2024. Kurtzman wanted to see more ‘streaming movies’ air on Paramount+ that link to the TV arm of the franchise, leading to the abominable Star Trek: Section 31, which put the nail in that coffin.
With the TV part of the franchise winding down over the next year, any such projects seem a vanishingly small prospect. Another planned cinematic approach was to tell a Star Trek ‘origin story’, set in the original timeline and around the point Starfleet was formed and humanity made first contact with alien life (which anyone who knows their canon will recognise are a good 100 years apart).
Steve Yockey was penning a script that Toby Haynes and Seth Grahame-Smith were variously directing, still with Abrams around on producing duties, while Simon Kinberg was also a name floating around attached to this origins project. Indeed, Kinberg was being mooted as a potential future Kevin Feige of Star Trek, overseeing a variety of films under the Star Trek banner.
A mixture of politics and corporate interests have since aligned to put Star Trek in a potentially challenging place, however.
Only on Paramount Skydance…
The initial plan was to make a release a new Star Trek film in mid-2026, marking the franchise’s 60th anniversary. Then came the merger between Paramount and Skydance Media, the company run by David Ellison, heir to the right-leaning Ellison family fortune (one of the richest on the planet).
With Ellison now CEO of Paramount Skydance, there was a plan to ‘re-evaulate’ its key franchises, Star Trek included. This has led to much speculation that the LGBTQ representation seen in the Kurtzman TV era could start to evaporate.
The dream of a Star Trek 4 also vanished, with the newly merged company deciding not to pursue further adventures with Kirk, Spock and their crew. Instead, the plan is to chart a new frontier: a Star Trek film with no connections to either previous series, films or anything in development over the past decade.
After their success with the perky Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, writer-directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley were hired in November 2025 to develop this new take. It appears they’re still hard at work on this, with no new details currently forthcoming.
The only certainty is this: there will be no Star Trek movie in 2026.
My guess would be, if this version gets made at all, we might see it in 2028. That’s 12 years since Beyond, and the longest gap between Star Trek movies we have ever seen. How Goldstein and Daley will make something free of any existing canon is hard to imagine, but still, the prospect remains an exciting one.
Star Trek's success at the box office has been predicated so far on nostalgia and fans turning up see characters or narratives they already know. Without those pulls, can Star Trek buck the trend? When its next mission finally does happen, can it conquer the big screen as Star Wars or Marvel have? Those are questions we won’t see answered for at least a couple more years.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts (including Star Trek one Make It So) and books, via Linktr.ee here. Don’t miss him on the Film Stories Podcast Network too.
