Sophia Michaels
Star Trek is a huge franchise, one that has included some of the best sci-fi movies of all time. While there’s plenty of new TV content available for those with a Paramount+ subscription, the franchise’s future on the big screen remains a mystery. For a while the great Quentin Tarantino was developing a Star Trek movie, although that seems to have been left by the wayside. His co-writer Mark L. Smith recently spoke about working on that movie, and why it ultimately didn’t work out.
Trekkies new and are always keeping track of the upcoming Star Trek movie and TV shows, so there was a ton of chatter surrounding Tarantino’s interest in making his own. Smith spoke to Collider about his experience working on the script, peeling back the curtain on what the Kill Bill filmmaker was thinking at the moment. In his words:
It was a different thing, but this was such a particular different type of story that Quentin wanted to tell with it that it fit my kind of sensibilities. So I wrote that, Quentin and I went back and forth, he was gonna do some stuff on it, and then he started worrying about the number, his kind of unofficial number of films. I remember we were talking, and he goes, ‘If I can just wrap my head around the idea that Star Trek could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?’ And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk. I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those that I can’t ever see happening. But it would be the greatest Star Trek film, not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was just a balls-out kind of thing.
Well, my FOMO is through the roof. It sounds like the filmmaker definitely had a lot of excitement about putting his spin on Star Trek, and it seemingly would have been a wild ride. But in the end it seems Tarantino’s plans to do just ten movies might have gotten in the way of his sci-fi aspirations.
Since cinephiles like to rank Tarantino’s movies, I have to wonder how his Star Trek movie might have changed things up. It would have been the first time Tarantino was working within a beloved franchise, which is a huge departure from the otherwise visionary director. And smart money says it would have been like any of the other Star Trek movies before it.
Later during that same conversation with Collider Mark L. Smith offered more information about what he was planning alongside Quentin Tarantino. It sounds like it would have been a brutal take on Star Trek lore, which makes sense for anyone who has seen Tarantino’s bloody filmography. Smith shared:
But I think his vision was just to go hard. It was a hard R. It was going to be some Pulp Fiction violence. Not a lot of the language, we saved a couple things for just special characters to kind of drop that into the Star Trek world, but it was just really the edginess and the kind of that Tarantino flair, man, that he was bringing to it. It would have been cool.
How cool is that? Something tells me that even putting Phasers set to stun would have been a violent experience in Tarantino’s Star Trek movie. Unfortunately it seems like he’s mostly let that project fall to the wayside, with his tenth (and presumably final) movie The Movie Critic coming down the line.
While Quentin Tarantino looked at Star Trek as an exception to his ten movie film, it’s doesn’t look like he’s actively pursuing that project. And as such, fans of the franchise are left wondering how/when it will return to the big screen.
The Star Trek franchise has found its streaming home on Paramount+ including a bunch of new content. While we wait for movie news, be sure to check out the 2024 movie release dates to plan your next movie experience.
