Goodbye Captain Kirk. So long Chris Pine. Adios Mr. Spock. (At least Zachary Quinto’s Mr. Spock.) The next Star Trek movie appears to be a full-fledged reboot.
Puck reports that Paramount is in talks with producer Simon Kinberg to become a “a franchise shepherd à la Alex Kurtzman for Trek TV projects” for the next Star Trek movie. Although Paramount has toyed with a seemingly endless array of options for a fourth Star Trek starring Pine, Quinto, and Zoe Saldana as the “Kelvin” timeline crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, this new film project is supposedly a reboot of the material.
THR reports that this movie “is said to be set decades before the events of the 2009 movie that was directed J.J. Abrams, likely around modern times. It is said to involve the creation of the Starfleet and humankind’s first contact with alien life.” The latter was previously the subject of the Star Trek: The Next Generation movie Star Trek: First Contact. The earliest-set Star Trek TV show, Star Trek: Enterprise, about the crew of the first and the founding of the Federation, took place in the 22nd century.
READ MORE: Chris Pine Says He’s Clueless About Star Trek’s Future
The most recent Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond, was released to theaters in 2016. In the years since, the list of abandoned Star Trek 4s Paramount announced or developed and then scrapped is about as long as a starship nacelle. They include a time travel storyline that would have starred Chris Hemsworth as Captain Kirk’s father, a film written and directed by Noah Hawley, and a movie directed by Quentin Tarantino.
At one point, Paramount made a big deal of announcing a new Star Trek movie produced by Abrams. The cast of the film reacted with shock, and said publicly that was news to them. No further updates ever materialized.
Kinberg’s previous credits include writing and producing numerous installments in the X-Men film franchise (he also directed the last movie in the series, Dark Phoenix), plus Jumper, the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes, The Martian, Chappie, and The 355.
Toby Haynes is currently slated to direct this reboot Trek, with Seth Grahame-Smith working on the script.
Movies That Should Have Become Franchises But Didn’t
These movies were good enough to get sequels, or whole franchises. But it never happened for a variety of reasons.