After almost a decade without a new Star Trek film, it has just been announced by Paramount that a new Star Trek feature is indeed in development. The 60-year-old science fiction franchise has always been a genre trailblazer, and as a new Star Trek movie arrives on the horizon, now seems like the perfect time to revisit the past and see how this new film came out.
Star Trek is the brainchild of Gene Roddenberry and has its origins in the 1966 television series of the same name. The series followed the interstellar voyages of the crew of the starship USS Enterprise, a space exploration vessel under the command of the United Federation of Planets in the 23rd century. The crew of the Enterprise, which is made up of Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and others, has a mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new civilizations, and to boldly go where no man has gone before in human history.
As Star Trek broke records on TV, its parent company thought of developing the franchise for the big screen as well. The first of such films was Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. Five more films followed, and all of them starred the cast of the 1966 television series. As the original cast bowed out and was replaced by a new cast, Paramount developed the seventh film as Star Trek Generations (1994).
Generations was designed to serve as a stepping stone from the original cast to that of the new one, which had its own show in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The next three films focused on the new cast, and the final film within this timeline was Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), which was a monumental box office bomb.
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Paramount recalibrated after the failure of Star Trek: Nemesis and decided on a soft reboot, titled Star Trek. This 2009 film saw new actors portraying younger versions of the Original Series characters, but with a twist; it is technically a narrative continuation set in an alternate timeline that diverged from the original timeline due to events in the film. J.J. Abrams, who would later pivot to Star Wars, directed the 2009 film as well as its 2013 sequel, Star Trek: Into Darkness.
After the serious tone of these two outings was changed to the colorful comedy of 2016’s Star Trek: Beyond, audiences lost interest, and Beyond became the lowest-grossing film of the trilogy.
However, Paramount persisted in its exploits to make Part 4 of this saga. Chris Hemsworth, who played Chris Pine’s father in the 2009 film, was slated to return to the officially announced sequel in 2016. A couple of writers were also hired, but a few years passed before everyone realised this vision was not moving forward. At the same time, Quentin Tarantino became interested in a franchise film for the first time in his life and pitched his own Star Trek feature to the studio in 2017. It was said to be R-rated and a standalone feature that would not connect to the previous films.
While Tarantino’s attempt also went nowhere, S.J. Clarkson was in talks to direct Star Trek 4. Before anything could be substantiated, negotiations with Hemsworth and Pine to return abruptly ground to a halt, and no one knew if the sequel would move forward. Fargo creator Noah Hawley then approached the studio with his own spin on the franchise in 2020, and as fate would have it, Hawley’s pitch meant Paramount would have three separate potential Star Trek films in development at the same time.
As all three attempts fizzled out, Paramount attempted to resurrect Star Trek 4 once more, pitching it as a final chapter and announcing the return of the original cast. This came as a surprise to the cast itself who wondered how Paramount could announce something when negotiations to return had not yet concluded. Paramount persisted forward as writers were hired, but on the horizon lay another obstacle, the long-gestating merger of Paramount with David Ellison’s Skydance. Completion of this merger was the final nail in the coffin of Star Trek 4, which was quietly laid to rest in early 2025.
There had been significant hope that the latest Star Trek trilogy, beginning with 2009’s Star Trek and followed by 2013’s Star Trek: Into Darkness and 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, would lead to more films, and for a time, it seemed that that would be the case. Paramount had wanted to convert this trilogy into a long-running saga, modeled on Star Wars, but a slew of factors meant that this idea died in its infancy.
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With Elison now in control of Star Trek, news broke a couple of weeks ago that a new Star Trek film was finally in development. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Dailey, the duo who had delivered the fantastic Dungeons and Dragons film for Paramount last year, will shepherd the project as writers and directors.
The film is said to be a completely new project and will not be connected to the Chris Pine Star Trek universe that ended in 2016. With Star Trek being one of the flagship projects of Paramount, the studio, under the new leadership of David Ellison, is reportedly poised to capitalize on all the projects of studio in the coming decade.
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With Paramount going under a significant revamp under Elison, there are high chances that this new Star Trek film will indeed see the light of day. Every single Paramount franchise is getting a new entry as its new owners try to resurrect its past stature as the biggest film studio in America. We are still quite early when it comes to this new Star Trek feature, and hopefully, if things stay on track, we might see some important snippets regarding the film hitting the trades pretty soon.
