Back in 2019, there was buzz going around that director Quentin Tarantino was interested in doing a Star Trek movie with Paramount. A lot of fans got excited at the possibility of Tarantino tackling sci-fi, but nothing every really happened with the project.
We don’t know what direction Trek is going now when it comes to box office movies, but screenwriter Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) reveals a bit about what Tarantino was planning for his Trek and why he decided to walk away from the project.
Talking to Collider, Smith revealed that Tarantino’s Trek would have taken the franchise in a completely mature and different direction—not unlike what Thor: Ragnarok did for Marvel’s Thor films. He explains:
“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.”
Smith didn’t really go into specifics, but he also mentioned that Tarantino’s Star Trek would have also harkened to Guardians of the Galaxy on some level.
As to why the film didn’t push forward, it looked like Tarantino got caught up in the notion that he only ever wants to make 10 movies in his filmography—and he didn’t want Trek to be his last one. Smith continues, “”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.”
As of now, Tarantino’s next film is called The Movie Critic which is said to be another inside look at the entertainment industry through Tarantino’s lens. Though a lot of fans are disappointed that Tarantino didn’t want to pursue Star Trek, you can’t deny that his solid filmography does speak for itself when it comes to Tarantino’s choices of projects.
Who knows, maybe Tarantino will change his mind down the line. We’ll just have to wait and see.
