By At last report last month, a fourth “Star Trek” film with the Kelvin Timeline cast is dead in the water – actor Chris Pine saying he didn’t know of any plans to continue and he hadn’t read any scripts.
We do know the film has had a long and tumultuous development process with numerous people such as “Fargo” showrunner Noah Hawley developing a galactic pandemic-themed one to Quentin Tarantino planning a gangster-themed one before abandoning the project.
The latter had writer Mark L. Smith working on it alongside Tarantino who was linked for some time. However, it was never entirely clear just how official that version was, how far it progressed, nor how involved Tarantino would’ve actually been – reports ranging from as little as a story credit to as much as full-on directing it himself.
Recently Smith, out promoting the George Clooney-directed “The Boys in the Boat” which he wrote, spoke with Collider and confirmed the script for the Tarantino “Star Trek” is still sitting on his desk but it’s unlikely that it will ever get made.
He adds that Tarantino really did come close to potentially directing, but the filmmaker’s rule of helming only ten movies before retiring weighed heavily on him and ultimately turned him off the idea:
“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.
…It was just a balls-out kind of thing. I can’t say anything about the story. He would kill me. 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.”
Smith says part of the problem with the “Star Trek” film franchise now is it being caught in an identity crisis – between the cost-effective more intellectual sci-fi that the franchise was built on, and the big-budget “Star Wars”-style action spectacle that J.J. Abrams’ brought with his 2009 film onwards.
As a result, “there are different people at different levels” within Paramount who see it differently and so they have to try to find a way for “everyone to kind of meet in the middle and do a version of it.”
Smith adds Tarantino’s film would’ve changed things in the way “Thor: Ragnarok” did – “like suddenly it had a different feel for the Marvel stuff… that’s what I thought that it could bring to Star Trek was just a different feel.”
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