Star Trek almost was Quentin Tarantino’s 10th film

The Star Trek franchise seems to be doing great nowadays with TV shows and video games coming out regularly, but the film side of the business seems kind of cursed (at least that’s what Chris Pine thinks). It’s been more than seven years since Star Trek Beyond was released, yet new theatrical Star Trek projects seem to be stuck in what sometimes feels like development hell.

Perhaps chief among the unmade films is Quentin Tarantino’s ‘hard R’ Star Trek, which once recruited The Revenant‘s Mark L. Smith to pen a script. Now, while discussing George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat with Collider, the screenwriter went into detail about the most surprising Star Trek project of all time: “It was a different thing, but this was such a particular different type of story that Quentin wanted to tell with it that it fit my kind of sensibilities.”

It sounds like the folks at Paramount and Bad Robot, including J.J. Abrams, were on board with Tarantino taking a crack at the long-running sci-fi franchise, and so he and Smith worked on a script for a good while. It wasn’t until Tarantino started having second thoughts about Star Trek being his tenth and final film that the project started to crumble: “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.”

This is a bit of a head-scratcher, especially since no one ever forced Tarantino to retire after making ten films. It’s a made-up number he suddenly started rambling about. In case you didn’t know, The Movie Critic will supposedly be his final film.

Regarding the tone and potential violence included in the film, Smith confirmed that, yup, it’d have felt like a proper Quentin Tarantino flick: “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’s hard to imagine Paramount executives ultimately agreeing to greenlight and release this type of Trek film, but who knows, maybe they were banking on the weirdness and surprise of it all.

As it stands, the next Star Trek film should be a continuation of the Kelvin timeline saga, but with the Enterprise crew scattered to the four winds and no director attached after WandaVision’s Matt Shakman departed to make Marvel Studios’ Fantastic Four reboot instead, who knows when it’ll actually move forward.