Last ‘Star Trek 4’ Director On Abrupt Shut Down Before 2022 Production Start: “The Stages Went Away”
It’s been almost a decade since the release of Star Trek Beyond, but Paramount has made several efforts to get the franchise back onto the big screen during that time. The studio actually set a December 22, 2023 release date for a sequel to Beyond with the Kelvin Universe cast lead by Chris Pine returning. But in the fall of 2022 that “Star Trek 4” was pulled from the schedule. Now the director for that project is talking about how close he got to filming Trek’s return to theaters.
Shakman on the end of his Trek
Director Matt Shakman was tapped to direct the fourth Kelvin Universe Star Trek movie in the summer of 2021. One year later Shakman exited the project and took on the job of helming a Fantastic Four movie for Marvel Studios, who he had worked with previously when he directed WandaVision. His new movie The Fantastic Four: First Steps is set to be released next week and an interview with Variety includes new details on Shakman’s jump from Trek back to Marvel. He reveals that when Marvel first reached out in the spring of 2022 things had progressed pretty far with the Star Trek, movie saying “we had stages, we had crew, we were moving ahead.”
The situation was different just a few months later, from Variety:
Meanwhile, by the late summer, the “Star Trek” film had “changed dramatically,” Shakman says. The stages went away. The crew was let go. “It didn’t have a start date anymore.” “The Fantastic Four,” meanwhile, was churning ahead, so Shakman swapped one cosmic story about hope and optimism for another. (Despite some prodding, Shakman remains tight-lipped on what his version of “Trek” would’ve looked like: “The core idea, I think, remains the same. I really hope they get a chance to make that movie.”).
This isn’t the first time we have heard about how far things got for Shakman’s Star Trek movie. In 2023 TrekMovie’s All Access Star Trek podcast spoke to veteran Star Trek makeup designer James MacKinnon, who revealed he had been hired by Shakman, but after working for just a week he was fired and the project was “shut down.” As for why, MacKinnon speculated “We were supposed to shoot in the middle of [2022]… but I think a script rewrite went in a different direction.” And earlier this year creature designer Neville Page revealed to TrekMovie he too had been working on the project for a while before it was shut down. He confirmed he had read the script (apparently before the rewrite) and had “folders full of false starts” by the time the crew were let go that summer.
The Shakman shutdown is very similar to what happened two years earlier with Noah Hawley. In 2020 the Fargo writer/director was in pre-production on a Star Trek movie, with a production schedule already set for filming in Australia. Hawley had come up with an original idea and was in the process of casting Cate Blanchett and Rami Malek before new management came into Paramount and shut down the project, deciding to pivot back to doing a fourth Kelvin movie… the Shakman movie they shut down two years later. Hawley bounced back after that experience, developing the upcoming Alien: Earth TV series coming to FX and Hulu on August 12.
Paramount still officially contends that the Star Trek 4 project is in development, planned to be the final film for the Kelvin Universe crew, with a cast led by Chris Pine. The film got yet another screenwriter in early 2024. Members of the cast continue to talk about how they are eager to return one more time, including Simon Pegg, who just last month talked about how he hoped the film could return to “spirit of TOS.”
Left to right: Simon Pegg plays Scotty, Sofia Boutella plays Jaylah and Chris Pine plays Kirk in Star Trek Beyond from Paramount Pictures, Skydance, Bad Robot, Sneaky Shark and Perfect Storm Entertainment
The fourth Kelvin movie is being developed in parallel with a “Franchise Origin Movie” (with Toby Haynes signed on to direct from a script by Seth Grahame-Smith). And the studio had planned for the “origin” Star Trek movie to actually be the next release, including announcing it as part of their 2026 release slate. However, in the last year there has been no reported movement on Haynes’ Star Trek, and the studio has yet to set an official release date.
So don’t expect a Star Trek movie in theaters in time for the 60th anniversary year. Right now it appears that the film franchise continues to languish, and it’s likely that no decisions on where to go next (and how much to spend) will be made until after the Skydance/Paramount merger gets approved, and David Ellison takes over the company, including direct control of Paramount Pictures. The last two films were co-produced with Skydance and CEO David Ellison was credited as an executive producer on both Into Darkness and Beyond. As we reported last week, the FCC is now expected to approve the deal some time before the October deadline.
