In 2017, an unexpected bit of news arrived: Quentin Tarantino was going to make a “Star Trek” movie — an R-rated “Star Trek” movie, to boot! While Tarantino has always written his own scripts, his proposed “Star Trek” movie would change things up — Tarantino would pitch some ideas, and a different screenwriter would cobble them together into a screenplay. After consulting with a group of writers, studio Paramount tapped Mark L. Smith, who wrote “Overlord,” “The Revenant,” and this year’s “Twisters,” to tackle the script.
I got to speak with Tarantino in 2019, when he was still working on “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” During the course of the conversation, I asked him to confirm if he was going to make a “Star Trek” movie. “It’s a very big possibility,” Tarantino told me. “I haven’t been dealing with those guys for a while cause I’ve been making my movie. But we’ve talked about a story and a script. The script has been written and when I emerge my head like Punxsutawney Phil, post-‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,’ we’ll pick up talking about it again.”
Things seemed to be moving along. Reports indicated there would be some sort of “gangster” element to the script, along with time travel. And the core “Trek” characters, like Kirk and Spock, would be part of the story. But the years ticked on, and the validity of the project remained somewhat in question. And then the project fell apart. Now, all these years later, Tarantino is speaking about the never-made film, and confirming it’s definitely never going to happen.
Tarantino’s Star Trek is ‘never going to happen’
While appearing on Club Random with Bill Maher, Tarantino addressed his potential “Star Trek” movie, and in case you still thought it might happen someday, Tarantino is here to set the record straight. “It’s never going to happen,” the director said. “There’s been so much misinformation about what it was going to be – nothing but misinformation. I live in a special zone and part of my zone is because I’m not on Instagram and Facebook, I’m not creating this constant dialogue with the world with what’s going on with my life.” Tarantino added: “My point being though, they write it in a show biz magazine and then that gets picked up in 140 pieces because I’m not shutting that down because I’m not connected.”
All of this makes it sound like Tarantino is implying folks were just making up info about the project, or at the very least, were operating under inaccurate information. That said, Mark L. Smith has opened about the project in the past, spilling some details along the way. “I wrote a Star Trek with Tarantino, and that was a sci-fi script on which I could have fun and lean into some bigger, broader things,” he said at one point.
As to why the movie never came to be, Smith implied (via Collider) it had to do with Tarantino’s plan to retire after directing 10 movies. “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.”
I suppose the only person who really knows why the Tarantino “Star Trek” movie never happened is Tarantino himself. Meanwhile, we’ll just have to wait and see what his next and potentially final movie may be.