As much as fans want to see the reunited Star Trek: The Next Generation crew continue in a movie version of Star Trek: Picard, Patrick Stewart has his doubts.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: there’s some bad news for Star Trek fans. No, we’re not talking about the galling cancelation and removal of Star Trek: Prodigy from the Paramount+ streaming service, although that is indeed bad news.
We’re talking about the hopes some fans had that Star Trek: Picard would lead to more adventures featuring the crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation. After holding off a full reunion for two seasons, the third season of Picard brought the one-time captain back with his most famous senior officers, along with surprise appearances from the likes of Ro Laren and Elizabeth Shelby. The result was an utterly delightful season of television, one that certainly touched on previous adventures, but also created new dynamics and introduced new characters.
Season three showrunner Terry Matalas has been open on social media about calling for a continuation called Star Trek: Legacy, which would follow Captain Seven of Nine on the Enterprise-G while also checking in on Admirals Picard and Riker, Head of Starfleet Medical Beverly Crusher, and others. But Patrick Stewart has even bigger plans, calling for a fifth Next Generation movie based on Picard. After initial reluctance to reteam with his former cast, Stewart has embraced the idea and even pitched more of it during an interview with Indiewire.
“I think we could do a movie, a Picard-based movie,” Stewart enthused. “Now not necessarily at all about Picard but about all of us. And to take many of those wonderful elements, particularly from Season 3 of Picard and take out of that what I think could be an extraordinary movie.”
Certainly, fans would agree, even despite the TNG crew’s spotted big-screen record. While Star Trek: First Contact has its fans, the other three movies starring Enterprises -D and -F left audiences disappointed. But with new interactions in place and more than two decades’ worth of character development to catch up on, a Picard movie could succeed where other TNG films have failed.
In that same interview with Indiewire, Stewart recalled that Picard producers sold him on the reunion idea based on the fact that there’s been so much growth for the TNG characters. He recalls them telling him, “Look, guys, in the last 20 years your lives must have changed. They’ve transformed. There’ve been excitements, there’ve been disappointments. There may even have been tragedies. But we don’t know what those things are yet, so we have to explore and find out.”
But while those twenty years would indeed be fertile storytelling ground, Stewart also admits that he hasn’t had much traction with the studio. “I keep telling people and mentioning it, and so far there’s been no eager response,” he admitted. “But it might well happen. And that would be I think a very appropriate way to say, ‘And goodbye folks.’”
As nice as it would be, a Picard movie requires Paramount to make Trek fans happy, and that doesn’t seem to be their business model at the moment.
