With Star Trek: Discovery season 3 on the way, Star Trek: Lower Decks currently on air, and Star Trek: Picard having finished earlier this year, you may have had your fill of Star Trek. Well, maybe not... we could all do with a little more Trek.
Where the small screen has been full to the brim, the big screen has been sparse. In fact, we haven't had a Star Trek movie since Star Trek: Beyond in 2016. Of course, there have been numerous rumours about a follow-up, including a potential Quentin Tarantino-led Trek movie that would basically be Pulp Fiction in space.
Then there's Noah Hawley's Trek movie. The creator of the Fargo TV series and Legion was hired by the studio Paramount to develop a potential Trek movie, but that has since been put on hold. Variety reports that the script was finished and designers were hired when the pause button was pressed last month. Little else is known about the project, though it would have centred on "a virus that wipes out vast parts of the known universe”. Rumours suggest the topic may have been the reason for the halt in production, though the story was developed pre-pandemic.
Speaking to Variety, Hawley added that – contrary to other reports – the new movie would have centred on a different crew before linking back to the main series. “We’re not doing Kirk and we’re not doing Picard,” Hawley said. “It’s a start from scratch that then allows us to do what we did with Fargo, where for the first three hours you go, ‘Oh, it really has nothing to do with the movie,’ and then you find the money. So you reward the audience with a thing that they love.”
It’s been a rough and rocky road for Star Trek 4. Phasers were set to stun back in 2018 when both Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth (who played Kirk’s father) supposedly exited the project (via The Hollywood Reporter) and S. J. Clarkson (Jessica Jones) stepped away as director. The project then went through multiple variations, with Hawley's being the latest. If that doesn't end up going ahead, we could be back to square one again.
