Paramount have decided to shelve the Star Trek "Kelvinverse" setting created by J.J. Abrams, apparently for good. This setting was the home to three Star Trek movies, Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) and Star Trek Beyond (2016), starring Chris Pine as Captain Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock and Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy.
A fourth film in the setting had been mooted for years, but Paramount had repeatedly flip-flopped on the idea, at one point considering a new film focusing on Chris Pine's Kirk travelling back in time to meet his father from the first film, played by a pre-Marvel Chris Hemsworth. They then shelved that idea to consider a pitch by Quentin Tarantino, who wanted to make a whole new Trek film with a new cast based on the classic episode A Piece of the Action. A new Kelvinverse movie was put into development a couple of years ago, with the cast all eager to return. However, Paramount have apparently grown cooler on the idea. The three films were very expensive but only the first one was a smash hit success, with the latter two generating modest returns at best. All three films also generated mixed critical notices, with praise for the cast and the general acting, but criticism for aspects of the visual design and the stronger focus on explosions and visual effects than the character-based storytelling Star Trek is best-known for. A common criticism was that the three films felt more like Star Wars than Trek, and it's telling that momentum for the films stalled when Abrams skipped town to work on actual Star Wars, directing both The Force Awakens (2015) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019).
In the meantime, the Star Trek franchise has returned to its ancestral home on television, with first Star Trek: Discovery and now Star Trek: Strange New Worlds taking on the classic time period, with new actors playing Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Uhura etc.
Firm plans for the new Star Trek movie have not fully settled, but it's rumoured that Paramount is considering a back-to-basics approach about the "origin story" of the Federation and Starfleet. This has alarmed Star Trek fans already annoyed with the franchise's obsession with going backwards rather than forwards, and its increasingly self-contradictory canon and continuity, already stretched by this constant revisiting and rewriting of the show's past.
Simultaneously, Scott Bakula has been pushing for a return to the franchise in his role from Star Trek: Enterprise as Jonathan Archer, the captain of the original NX-01 Enterprise who later became one of the first Presidents of the Federation. It would be interesting if these ideas merged and we got a new, hopefully more grounded and less explosion-driven Trek film featuring one of its more popular leads, but this may be rather an optimistic idea.
The future of Star Trek should become clearer in the coming months. In the meantime, Paramount+ should air the fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and the first season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy in 2026.
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