What’s next for the Star Trek movie franchise has been the question that fans have been wondering for four years now. For a while there, Paramount seemed to have thrown their lot in with Fargo creator Noah Hawley, who was revealed to be attached to write and direct Star Trek 4 late last year. Since then, we’d worked out that the studio had changed their minds again.
Hawley has now confirmed this in a new interview, as well as revealing the first plot details of his take which we may or may not end up seeing. He told Variety that he had completed his script for the movie, and also begun to work with designers to help conceptualize the film’s look and visual feel. However, Paramount’s new boss Emma Watts then instructed him to put ST4 “on hold.”
Potentially the reason Watts got cold feet on the project is because Hawley wanted to reboot the franchise, rather than carry on with Chris Pine’s Kirk and the Enterprise crew. Or even any other familiar Trek crew.
“We’re not doing Kirk and we’re not doing Picard. 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.”
As Hawley reminds us, he’s known for taking a pre-existing property and subverting audience’s expectations by serving up a lot of original content – see Fargo and his trippy Marvel series Legion. So, we shouldn’t be shocked that he’s planning to do the same with Trek. It’s intriguing that he was going to introduce his own characters, though, rather than build on a recognizable IP.
To clarify, Hawley went on to tell Variety that his movie isn’t dead, but is just “in stasis.” Still, other reports have pointed to Watts favoring the idea of reviving the original Star Trek 4, starring Pine and Chris Hemsworth as Kirk’s dad. While the movie side of things continues to be in disarray, at least there’s plenty of Trek TV content to keep us well fed. Lower Decks currently airs weekly on CBS All Access, before Discovery season 3 kicks off on October 15th.
