At its core, Star Trek has always been about exploring and examining humanity, albeit through the lens of futuristic sci-fi. The countless movies and TV shows have been packed with plenty of social and societal subtext, even when dealing with epic battles between fleets of starships and a myriad of alien races.
With the advent of Paramount+, we’re now in store for more fresh Trek content than ever, with the upstart platform already announcing tentative and yet highly ambitious plans to drop a new show every quarter. That’s without even considering the murky future of the big screen adventures for the Enterprise crew, which became even cloudier when J.J. Abrams was announced to be producing a new feature film just the other day, while there are still four other concepts floating around behind the scenes at the studio from various creative minds.
There’ve been rumors that Star Trek could be venturing into R-rated territory as well, and we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us Discovery‘s Captain Pike would be getting his own spinoff long before Strange New Worlds was announced – that the idea is still on the table at Paramount and it’ll be applied to multiple upcoming movie and TV projects.
While an R-rating instantly conjures up images of Starfleet telling the Romulans to f*ck off or redshirts crying out expletives as they fall to their inevitable doom, it could also be used to tackle some weighty subject matter. Skewing towards an older audiences isn’t always about cuss words and gore, but with so much happening in regards to Star Trek at the moment, it’ll be interesting to see what form future projects eventually take.