Simon Pegg called Quentin Tarantino’s intentions for an R-rated Star Trek film “bats*** crazy,”. However, he believed fans would have welcomed the project if it had ever been made.
It’s hard to believe, but the filmmaker of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction personally contacted Paramount with the idea for a Captain Kirk spin-off. Tarantino was signed on to helm a big-screen Star Trek production for several years.
However, the project never materialized despite years of effort and a group of writers working on the concept, including Iron Man 3 co-writer Drew Pearce and Twisters writer Mark L. Smith. Tarantino acknowledged in 2020 that he was no longer involved.
In an interview with Collider, Simon Pegg, who starred in Star Trek and Mission Impossible, called the concept “everything you would expect a Quentin Tarantino Star Trek script to be.”
He went on, “That was what we call in the business bats*** crazy,” without giving away exactly what the film’s plot would have been. “I think it would have been such an incredible sort of curio to see Star Trek through his lens. I don’t know how it would have gone over with the fans, but it certainly would have been an interesting thing.”
Although Mark L. Smith has previously said that the plot would have included Captain Kirk and time travel, with themes derived from vintage gangster films, specifics of the concept have long been unclear. Tarantino, on the other hand, has called it “Pulp Fiction in space.”
The future of the Star Trek franchise on the big screen has remained far more uncertain, even though multiple TV series have been released in the last ten years. The third and (as of right now) last in the series’ Kelvin reboot timeline, Star Trek Beyond (2016), starring Pegg as Scotty, was the last legitimate Star Trek movie to be released in theatres.
Since then, a number of concepts for more Trek movies have been put out, including several unsuccessful attempts to get a fourth film in the reboot series produced.
Simon Pegg has no further information regarding a fourth Star Trek movie. That film has been stuck in development hell for nearly ten years. Pegg speculates that a fourth Kelvin temporal feature might be released now that the Skydance/Paramount merger is complete. However, is there still enough public interest in seeing competing portrayals of Kirk, Scotty, and the others in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds? With a big-screen recreation of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it appears increasingly likely that Paramount will carry on the Kelvin timeline. But one thing is certain: since the first Star Trek series in 1979, ten years is the longest we have gone without a new movie. Hopefully, we will get something soon.
(Via Collider)
