Star Trek‘s USS Enterprise will almost assuredly keep seeking out strange new worlds, but it will do so without the cast of director J. J. Abrams’ 2009 feature franchise reboot at the helm. The studio has ceased all development on a potential fourth film in favor of a fresh approach for the cinematic side of the iconic multimedia franchise.
The news comes deep in a new Variety piece profiling David Ellison, the new head of Paramount after his production company, Skydance, bought the iconic studio earlier this year. In a paragraph on the mogul’s plans for the immediate future of the studio, Variety noted a number of projects that the studio is looking at developing, including a new cinematic take on the classic franchise.
The hope is to have a fresh “Star Trek” movie, though the studio has moved on from the idea of bringing back Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and the rest of the ensemble from the J.J. Abrams reboot.
Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot was controversial at the time with some franchise fans, as it saw a recasting of the iconic original series Star Trek characters played by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, and the rest with younger actors. Pine took over the role of Captain James Kirk from Shatner, while Quinto replaces Nimoy as the half-Vulcan science officer Mr. Spock.
Of course, recasting was necessary as the story is set early in the Starfleet careers of the Enterprise crew in a story that saw an older Spock (Nimoy), traveling back in time in pursuit of an alien Romulan commander bent on revenge on the United Federation of Planets. The events of the movie created an alternate timeline, known as the “Kelvin Timeline” after one of the other starships involved in the story, allowing potential new stories to be told about the crew’s younger days without being beholden to the main franchise’s continuity.
The reboot cast became accepted by a majority of Trek fans, opening up the doorway for other actors to step into classic characters’ uniform boots in such series as Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
The “Kelvin Timeline” continued through two more films – 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness and 2016’s Star Trek Beyond. There had been much talk of development for a fourth outing with this cast, but nothing has ever materialized as Paramount shifted the franchise’s focus to the number of Trek television series being made for their streaming service Paramount Plus. A handful of comics and spinoff novels did fill out more adventures of the Kelvin Timeline Enterprise crew.
