Eight years after the failed Star Trek Beyond, Paramount is prepared to dry-hump yet another Star Trek franchise onto the big screen.
The goal is to release this latest incarnation in 2025 and set it in the present day:
Longtime X-Men producer Simon Kinberg is … in talks to produce a new Star Trek feature for Paramount Pictures[.] If all goes well, the door would open to him taking active creative roles on the rest of the storied franchise’s film side.
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The project Kinberg would step into is already in very active development. Toby Haynes, who directed episodes … of the Star Wars series Andor, is on board to direct the new feature, with Seth Grahame-Smith writing the script. The project is said to be set decades before the events of the 2009 movie that was directed J.J. Abrams, likely around modern times. It is said to involve the creation of the Starfleet and humankind’s first contact with alien life.
Wasn’t that movie called Star Trek: First Contact?
Oddly enough, this does not mean Paramount is giving up on its current franchise. Although Star Trek Beyond bombed creatively and at the box office (good job making Sulu gay, guys), there is still hope of closing out that franchise with a fourth feature starring Chris Pine, Zoe Saldana, and Zachary Quinto.
Who’s asking for that?
And does America really want a fourth Star Trek franchise in nearly as many decades? The problem with the attempts to reboot this series is that none of the later actors can hold a candle to the icons that made up the original cast. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and the rest looked like people who should be on the big screen — they are movie stars. The Next Generation had Patrick Stewart, but the rest of the cast felt like TV actors. The Chris Pine crowd never came off as adults. They always gave the impression of kids play-acting.
In today’s woke, anti-masculine, unisex world, it is hard to see this casting problem improving with a fourth franchise. You just know it’s going to be full of drag queens, transsexuals, transvestites, and gay stuff. The excuse for this icky crap will be that Star Trek has always been on the cutting edge of politics. Yeah, in the sixties, when the cutting edge was sane, when the cutting edge was about professionalism, equal opportunity, not being offended over words, individual liberty, the importance of every human life, and a masculine, forward-looking foreign policy based on peace through strength.
If the original Star Trek were released today exactly as is, it would almost certainly be a big hit among Normal People but excoriated by our self-elected elites as racist, sexist, colonialist, homophobic, and bigoted against body types (i.e., fat people who look terrible in a Starfleet uniform).
Why would anyone bother with this crap when the original Star Trek series and the six movies that followed are available on Blu-ray?
In 2023, I went back and watched Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013), and Star Trek Beyond (2016), and they’re just not very good movies. All the humanity has been stripped and replaced with grab-ass adventurism. I’ll take the unfairly derided Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and its search for God and what it means to be human over that empty, soulless trilogy any day of the week.
Star Trek lost me forever at Gay Sulu and making election denier Stacey Abrams the President of Earth.
“New” used to mean new. Now it means incoming crap.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.
