The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay have revealed their abandoned plot for a fourth Star Trek film.
"We worked on a couple of Star Trek movies. [This] would have been the fourth in the franchise, reuniting Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pine," McKay told Esquire. "The conceit was that through a cosmic quirk in the Star Trek world, they were the same age. It was going to be a grand father-son space adventure – think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in space."
Pine and Hemsworth starred alongside each other in 2009's Star Trek, directed by J.J. Abrams. The film's success spawned Star Trek Into Darkness in 2013, and Star Trek Beyond in 2016.
"We were really thrilled about it. We had an original villain and a really cool 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque sci-fi idea at the core. We worked on it for two and a half years with Lindsey Weber, our non-writing executive producer on Rings of Power, and an amazing director, S.J. Clarkson," he continued. "The movie eventually fell apart, and it really was a heartbreak for us. It's part of what led us here, because it got us thinking 'Gosh, with a big IP title, big movie stars, and a story that we all felt had a chance to be terrific, it couldn't come together."
McKay added that Pine and the Enterprise would have had to "seek out the wreckage of the ship that his father died on because of a mystery and a new villain. In the ship, they stumble across his father's pattern. They beam him out and he has no idea that no time has passed at all, and that he's looking at his son. Then the adventure goes on from there."
