The Rings of Power creators discuss their abandoned Star Trek 4 film

Before they were showrunners on Amazon’s new flagship show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne primarily wrote movie screenplays. The highest profile film they wrote, which didn’t end up making it all the way to the screen, was a script for a fourth Star Trek movie. Set to star Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldaña, Karl Urban and all the rest of the Enterprise crew from the recent spate of movies, it would have served as a sequel to 2016’s Star Trek Beyond. In addition to the returning main cast, it also would have marked the first time that Chris Hemsworth would have reprised his role as George Kirk after his character died in the opening minutes of the first installment.

Alas, the movie never made it into pre-production. Few details have ever surfaced about Payne and McKay’s Star Trek 4 screen treatment, but with the pair making the press rounds for The Rings of Power and a different iteration of Star Trek 4 in development, they’re finally in a place where they can talk more about their take on the beloved franchise, and how James and George Kirk could possibly have shared the screen.

The Rings of Power showrunners spill details on scrapped Star Trek 4 movie

“The conceit was that through a cosmic quirk in the Star Trek world, they were the same age. It was going to be a grand father-son space adventure,” McKay told Esquire.

Payne elaborated: “Our conceit was, ‘What if right before the Kelvin impacted with that huge mining ship, George Kirk had tried to beam himself over to his wife’s shuttle where his son, Jim Kirk, had just been born? And what if the ship hadn’t completely exploded – what if it left some space junk?'”

As they tell it, a “new villain” would have been central to the movie, spurring Pine’s James T. Kirk to investigate the wreckage of the ship where his father died. “In the ship, they stumble across his father’s pattern. They beam him out and he has no idea that no time has passed at all, and that he’s looking at his son. Then the adventure goes from there,” McKay said.

It certainly would have been an interesting story to see play out, and would have fit right in with the sort of time travel paradoxes that the newer Trek films have relied on, such as when Zachary Quinto’s Spock met Leonard Nimoy’s.

While we may never see McKay and Payne’s version, a new version of Star Trek 4 is currently in the works. Yet even that movie is having some problems getting going. Though it was announced earlier this year that Star Trek 4 would be releasing in 2023, with Pine and the rest returning, a few months later the film was delayed indefinitely after director Matt Shakman left the project. It hasn’t been officially canceled, but the road looks bumpy.

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h/t Digital Spy