Ever since the under-performance of 2016’s Star Trek: Beyond, the franchise has struggled to find direction on the big screen. Attempts to continue J.J. Abrams’ ‘Kelvin Timeline’ with directors such as S.J. Clarkson and Matt Shakman attached often stalled. Even Quentin Tarantino’s script for a stand-alone Star Trek project never got past the development phase.

As Paramount plans to move on from the ‘Kelvin Timeline’, one of the filmmakers previously tapped to re-imagine Star Trek on film is speaking out about his abandoned project. Noah Hawley (Fargo, Alien: Earth) sat down on the SmartLess podcast to detail his scrapped Star Trek film, which involved completely new characters facing a “virus that wipes out vast parts of the known universe.” What drew Hawley to the franchise was a significant distinction from current popular IPs.

“I signed on, you know, after ‘Lucy in the Sky’; I thought, ‘Oh, I like this movie thing’. I’d like to do another one, but I think maybe I’d like to try something a little bigger. You know it’s all franchises, and I thought, yeah, but everything’s war, right? ‘Star Wars’ is war, and Marvel is war. But ‘Star Trek’ isn’t war. ‘Star Trek’ is exploration, right? It’s people solving problems by being smarter than the other guy.”

“So I went in, I talked to Paramount, I sold them this original idea. It wasn’t Chris Pine, it wasn’t anything. I wrote it, they said, ‘We love it, let’s prep it.’ We were, you know, we were… I was going to move to Australia, we were booking stages, whatever…”

Hawley was announced as director in late 2019, shortly after Star Trek 4 was scrapped due to a financial impasse with Chris Pine, as well as Chris Hemsworth, who was planning to reprise George Kirk from the 2009 installment. Production was set to commence after Hawley wrapped up the fourth season of Fargo. Then plans changed again.

“Jim Gianopulos, who was running the studio at the time, he’s like, ‘I’m going to bring in somebody else under me, and they’re going to take over the film studio’. And the first thing they did was kill the original ‘Star Trek’ movie because they said, ‘Well, how do we know people are going to like it?’ Like, you know, ‘Shouldn’t we do a transition movie from Chris Pine[’s cast], play it safe, you know, whatever?’ And so it kind of went away.”

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Paramount attempted to pivot back to Pine and his castmates for another attempt at Star Trek 4 despite announcing the sequel without a script. After years stuck in development, new studio executive David Ellison opted to scrap all plans to continue the ‘Kelvin Timeline’ in favor of a new take, potentially disconnected from any Star Trek continuity.

What are your thoughts on Noah Hawley’s unproduced Star Trek project? Let us know in the comments.

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