Last month brought the disappointing news that Noah Hawley’s Star Trek film may be stalled at Paramount Pictures as the studio reassesses its upcoming film slate but in a new interview with Variety, the Fargo creator has given a hopeful update on its status as well as tease new details in regards to its story.
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Hawley revealed that the news of the sci-fi project being stalled aren’t inherently untrue but that the film is “still alive, just in stasis” and is awaiting a decision from new studio president Emma Watts, who previously worked with the writer/director on his feature debut Lucy in the Sky during her time as an exec at Fox. He also revealed that his Star Trek script is finished and he was already lining up designers for production and that despite previous reports he was eyeing bringing back the cast of the J.J. Abrams franchise, he would instead introduce new characters while offering explicit connections to the previous franchise akin to the first season of Fargo in which Oliver Platt’s Stavros Milos finds the bag of money Steve Buscemi’s Carl Showalter buries in the snow in the Coen Brothers’ film.
“We’re not doing Kirk and we’re not doing Picard,” Hawley said. “It’s a start from scratch that then allows us to do what we did with Fargo, where for the first three hours you go, ‘Oh, it really has nothing to do with the movie,’ and then you find the money. So you reward the audience with a thing that they love.”
Watts recently was appointed to Paramount Motion Picture Group and is currently reassessing the forthcoming film slate for the studio, namely the state of the Star Trek film franchise, which has been up in the air for the past four years as various projects were put into development beginning with a fourth film helmed by S.J. Clarkson before being shelved due to cast contracting issues, an R-rated film helmed by Quentin Tarantino penned by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) and Hawley’s project.
Sources previously reported that Hawley’s film was actually set to bring in a new cast of characters rather than bringing back the Kelvin cast and would see the protagonists race to cure a deadly virus and, though Paramount hasn’t confirmed anything as of yet, given the world’s current situation it may be an explanation as to why his project is on hold. Tarantino unofficially dropped off the Smith-penned project earlier this year but stated it would most likely be made at some point, with the story set be based on a classic Star Trek episode set earthbound in a ’30s gangster setting.
Both projects are reportedly on hold at the studio, but the latter is being considered a viable option to carry the franchise forward, seen by the studio as a spinoff akin to the X-Men spin-off Logan and may move forward with that plan while they figure out how to move forward with the Kelvin Timeline or even one of the original timelines.
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With the CBS All Access series Discovery and Picard proving the franchise is still successful for the studio, it makes sense Paramount would rather take its time to move forward with another Star Trek film rather than rush one out in a similar vein to Beyond.
