Quentin Tarantino didn’t make his R-rated Star Trek movie because he didn’t want it to be the last film he ever made.
Speaking with Collider, writer Mark L. Smith opened up about Taraninto’s now-defunct Star Trek movie and explained that the project never came to fruition because the Pulp Fiction director didn’t want it to be his tenth and final movie.
“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,” Smith said. “So I wrote that, Quentin and I went back and forth, he was gonna do some stuff on it, and then he started worrying about the number, his kind of unofficial number of films. 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 know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those that I can’t ever see happening. But it would be the greatest Star Trek film, not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was just a balls-out kind of thing.”
Tarantino has openly discussed his plans to retire after making his tenth movie. He’s so far directed nine movies throughout his career, including 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, 1994’s Pulp Fiction, 1997’s Jackie Brown, 2003’s Kill Bill: Volume 1, 2004’s Kill Bill: Volume 2 (Tarantino considers the two Kill Bill volumes to be a single film), 2007’s Death Proof, 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, 2012’s Django Unchained, 2015’s The Hateful Eight, and 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Quentin Tarantino is currently working on his last movie
He’s planning on his last movie to be The Movie Critic, which will be set in the 1970s and be “based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag,” he previously told Deadline.
Tarantino further explained about The Movie Critic, “He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle might be if he were a film critic.”
Smith further noted that Tarantino’s Stark Trek movie would have been something totally “different” for the franchise similar to “ the way that [Thor] Ragnarok changed things. It was like suddenly it had a different feel for the Marvel stuff. It was like, “That’s fun. That’s different.” And I guess Guardians [of the Galaxy] to some level, but it was just like a different vibe and that’s what I thought that it could bring to Star Trek was just a different feel.”
