Star Trek is in a new heyday on television thanks to the slew of increasingly good Trek shows on Paramount+, but on the film side of things the franchise has been incredibly stagnant, with Paramount unable to get Star Trek 4 going. It has, in fact, been radio silence for a long while on whether the studio was even still working on the fourth film anymore, but Star Trek 4‘s former screenwriter says that the movie is still on track.
“It is, it’s still on the tracks,” Lindsey Anderson Beer told Collider. “I love that project, and it was another one that I had to hop off of to direct this movie, and that was a hard thing to do. But I love that everybody involved with that project.”
Just what “on the tracks” means isn’t too clear, as it sounds like the movie has lost yet another screenwriter as Anderson Beer moved on from it to direct and write Pet Sematary: Bloodlines. That puts the movie behind once again as it seemingly needs a new screenwriter to work out a finalized screenplay. This comes after the entire cast and crew was shocked when Paramount announced the film was going into production last year and before that Quentin Tarantino was attached to make a Star Trek film as well. There were also multiple other projects and ideas that have been floating around since Star Trek: Beyond landed in 2016 and underperformed, but nothing has gotten off the ground as the studio seemed to shift its focus away from theaters and to streaming. Since Star Trek: Beyond‘s release an entire universe of Trek shows has dropped on Paramount+ all in the original timeline, pushing the new film series into an even weirder corner.
Still, hearing that the film is still moving forward in some way should be good news for fans of Star Trek and the Kelvin timeline.