Star Trek is seeing a bit of a rebirth thanks to CBS All Access, basically basing its entire strategy around the franchise. The success of Star Trek: Picard has led some to wonder if any reboots for The Original Series (TOS), as the original 1960s Star Trek show is retroactively known, might be coming, especially one focusing on Captain Kirk. William Shatner, however, says it isn’t happening and that Captain James Tiberius Kirk’s story is basically told and done, even if it did end on the least satisfying last words ever spoken on film.
No. I think Kirk’s story is pretty well played out at this point. https://t.co/30qVk9uxKN
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) March 2, 2020
CBS is already mining the TOS era with Star Trek: Discovery, which has overlapped in some pretty dramatic ways with characters from TOS already. They gave Spock an adopted human sister and dove into the history of the Enterprise before Kirk took the captain’s chair. Pulling Shatner in for a series akin to Picard seems a little redundant and a bit too much, considering there is a plethora of other Star Trek series launching on the service. It’s probably impossible to recapture the magic of Shatner in TOS anyway. Shatner has danced around returning to the role, hinting at points that he might return in the rebooted films, known as the Kelvin Timeline, but nothing has ever come of it.
Speaking of the films, they are in the midst of an extended hiatus as Paramount figures out what it wants to do with the franchise after Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond failed to be the Marvel-sized hit they wanted it to be. That’s led to a variety of Star Trek concepts being floated, including one by Quentin Tarantino, but the franchise still appears stalled. Simon Pegg, who acts in the Kelvin Timeline films and co-wrote Beyond, thinks this is all from Paramount’s outsized expectations and mismanagement of the property before the rights came back under one company’s umbrella. He said the following to GamesRadar+:
The fact is, Star Trek movies don’t make Marvel money. They make maybe $500m at the most, and to make one now, on the scale they’ve set themselves, is $200m. You have to make three times that to make a profit.
I don’t feel like the last one… They didn’t really take advantage of the 50th anniversary. The regimen at the time dropped the ball on the promo of the film. And we’ve lost momentum. I think losing Anton [Yelchin] was a huge blow to our little family, and our enthusiasm to do another one might have been affected by that. So I don’t know.
There is hope on the horizon for fans of the Kelvin Timeline and Star Trek in general, however. It seems Paramount has finally settled on a direction forward, tapping Noah Hawley to write and direct a continuation of the adventures of the crew of the Enterprise. The entire cast is hopefully returning as well for the film, including Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, and Karl Urban.
