The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith has revealed some more details about the Star Trek movie he was meant to work on with director Quentin Tarantino – and it included Captain Kirk, a bit of time travel, and some gangster scenes.
Smith recalled the first time he talked to Tarantino about the movie after his initial meeting with J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot production company. "They just called me and said, “Hey, are you up for it? Do you want to go? Quentin wants to hook up.” And I said, “Yeah.” And that was the first day I met Quentin, in the room and he’s reading a scene that he wrote and it was this awesome cool gangster scene, and he’s acting it out and back and forth. I told him, I was so mad I didn’t record it on my phone. It would be so valuable. It was amazing," he told the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast.
"Then just we started working. I would go hang out at his house one night and we would watch old gangster films. We were there for hours… We were just kicking back watching gangster films, laughing at the bad dialogue, but talking about how it would bleed into what we wanted to do. Kirk’s in it, we’ve got him. All the characters are there. It would be those guys. I guess you would look at it like all the episodes of the show didn’t really connect. So this would be almost its own episode. A very cool episode. There’s a little time travel stuff going on. There’s all this other… it’s really wild."
However, it's unlikely that the movie will go ahead now. "I think I’m steering away from Star Trek," Tarantino said in 2019, two years after his name was first attached to the project. "I haven’t had an official conversation with those guys yet." Plus, there's the fact that the filmmaker insists he'll only make one more movie before he retires and, unfortunately, it seems unlikely that his last hurrah will be Star Trek.
While the Tarantino Star Trek movie may be a no-go, the USS Enterprise is still coming back to the big screen – WandaVision director Matt Shakman will be taking the reins this time. While we wait for Kirk, Spock, and co.'s next outing, check out our list of the best sci-fi movies of all time.
