Noah Hawley’s Star Trek movie would have a new crew: “We’re not doing Kirk [or] Picard”

While Star Trek is exploding on TV, the movies have stalled. When we get another one, it sounds like it may be sans Chris Pine and company.

Things are stalled in the Star Trek movie universe. I mean, things are stalled at the movies in general thanks to the coronavirus, but it’s especially bad for Trek. The last movie in the franchise, Star Trek Beyond, came out in 2016. A potential sequel to that starring the same cast — Chris Pine as Captain Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, etc. — stalled over contract negotiations. Quentin Tarantino had a weird idea for a Star Trek movie set on a gangster planet, but it doesn’t look like that’s going forward, either.

And then there’s Fargo creator Noah Hawley, who had an original pitch that — you guessed it — is stalled. Speaking to Variety, Hawley related that Emma Watts, Paramount’s head of feature films, has told him that his movie is “on hold.”

That said, it sounds like it was farther along than we thought: according to Hawley, he’s already written the script and was in the process of hiring designers to help him nail down the look when the project went into stasis. So if we get any Star Trek movie in the near-ish future, it sounds like it’s going to be this one.

So what is it about? Well, at one point Hawley reportedly had a pitch about a plague that sweeps through the galaxy and kills millions, but that was rejected for obvious reasons. All he’ll say about his current movie is that it’ll involve a new group of characters.

"We’re not doing Kirk and we’re not doing Picard. It’s a start from scratch that then allows us to do what we did with Fargo, where for the first three hours you go, ‘Oh, it really has nothing to do with the movie,’ and then you find the money. So you reward the audience with a thing that they love."

Hawley is referring to a scene from the fourth episode of Fargo where Stavros Milos (Oliver Platt) finds money buried in the snow by Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) in the original 1996 Fargo movie. The Fargo show is interesting, because while it has those sorts of tenuous ties to the original and shares the movie’s tone, the story is by and large completely different. That seems to be the approach Hawley is taking to Star Trek. And hey, it worked pretty well for Fargo, which is currently filming its fourth season.

At this point, I think any news about a Trek movie going forward would be welcome. But if Trekkies are tired of waiting for a new movie, there’s always TV…

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels