Eight years of waiting finally may come to an end soon. The film has been in the works from director Toby Haynes (Andor) and writer Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter). But it is unrelated to Star Trek 4. So Paramount is gearing up for a different Trek movie when they can’t even get Trek 4 off the ground? Hmmm…
The cast of the very first Star Trek movie, The Motion Picture.
Looking at the 45-year history of Star Trek on the big screen, we see that the first four William Shatner-led films were produced and released over the course of seven years (from 1979 to 1986), while the entire run of six movies from The Motion Picture in 1979 to The Undiscovered Country in 1991 happened over a span of 12 years. All four Patrick Stewart/Next Generation pictures were made over the course of eight years (from Generations in 1994 to Nemesis in 2002). And the Chris Pine reboot series might’ve slowed things down some after its 2009 debut, but still managed to do three movies in seven years.
But that brings us back to Star Trek 4, the untitled and presumed capper to the Pine iteration of the franchise. The last time fans have gone this long without a new Star Trek movie was… well, before there was such a thing as Star Trek movies. There’s even a whole Wikipedia page devoted to just the “development of Star Trek 4.”
There was some buzz about Star Trek 4 when Star Trek Beyond hit theaters. Producer J.J. Abrams revealed that a fourth film was being planned that would see Pine’s Captain Kirk reunited with Chris Hemsworth’s George Kirk, playing off of Hemsworth’s small but pivotal role in the 2009 movie as the famed Enterprise captain’s father. Was that tease just pre-release hype by Abrams intended to get folks excited for Beyond? It’s impossible to say, of course. But considering that Beyond made about a hundred million dollars less than its predecessor, Into Darkness, at the worldwide box office, and didn’t even break $200 million domestically, it’s no surprise that not much was heard about the proposed fourth film for some time after that.