With Paramount+ now beginning to make Star Trek movies, there are plenty of intriguing avenues the franchise’s feature films could take. The Star Trek movie franchise has been in bad shape for awhile now; the last entry was 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, which garnered strong reviews but landed softly at the box office. A potential fourth film starring Chris Pine and the rebooted Kelvin timeline version of the Star Trek: The Original Series USS Enterprise crew has remained in limbo ever since.
Conversely, Star Trek has been thriving on the small screen since Paramount+ revived the franchise in 2017 with Star Trek: Discovery. While not every modern television iteration of Star Trek has been an unqualified success, every show has a loyal fan base and provides a new wrinkle on the Star Trek concept. It’s no surprise that Alex Kurtzman and his team would get the opportunity to branch out into movies, and they have plenty of viable story options on the table.
10 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Reunion
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a double-edged sword in this regard. The show ended fantastically with the series finale “What You Leave Behind,” and the argument can be made that the story of these characters has already been told. But if Star Trek: Picard season 3 proved anything, it’s that these somewhat artificial seeming reunions can have real narrative potency if the right creators are involved. What’s the status of the station at the beginning of the 25th century? Did Bajor ever join the Federation? If anything, there’s almost too much to cover in one movie – DS9 might be in need of a full-on trilogy.
9 Star Trek: Voyager Reunion
Plenty of Star Trek: Voyager characters have played important roles in modern Star Trek. Admiral Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) currently stars in the animated Star Trek: Prodigy, set a few years after the last TNG film, Star Trek Nemesis. Former Borg drone Seven Of Nine (Jeri Ryan) became a crucial aspect of Star Trek: Picard, particularly in season 3. Unlike Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, coming up with a reason to reunite the Voyager cast would be as simple as Starfleet sending them on one last top-secret mission into the Delta Quadrant where they were marooned for seven years.
8 Worf USS Enterprise-E Movie
Star Trek: Picard season 3 confirmed a few things about the beloved Klingon Worf (Michael Dorn). Not only did Worf become the first Klingon Captain in Starfleet history, he took over command of the USS Enterprise-E when Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) was promoted and stepped down to coordinate the Romulan evacuation effort. Commodore Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) suggested that the Enterprise-E had either been lost or destroyed, followed by everyone staring at Worf, who says “that was not my fault.” A movie that chronicles Worf’s last mission aboard the Enterprise-E would give fans one last chance to see the ship and observe Captain Worf in action.
7 A Star Trek: Enterprise/Strange New Worlds Crossover
Integrating Star Trek: Enterprise into modern Star Trek has been tough, as it’s so far in the past relative to most other projects in the franchise. Star Trek: Discovery, the closest show chronologically to Enterprise, only paid it occasional lip service. That made sense, as Discovery never shared much thematically with Enterprise. The stronger, more natural bond for Enterprise would be Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Enterprise‘s resident Vulcan T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) could easily still be alive in the era of Strange New Worlds, and teaming her up with Lieutenant Spock (Ethan Peck) would be just about the greatest Vulcan team-up of all time.
6 Nicholas Meyer’s Khan Story Ceti Alpha V
The legendary director of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Nicholas Meyer believes he has one more major Star Trek story in him. Ceti Alpha V would chronicle the exploits of Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban) and his genetically augmented followers after they find themselves marooned on the titular planet. The project has gone through several iterations, temporarily becoming everything from a limited series to a podcast. But Nicholas Meyer deserves the full feature film treatment for what could potentially be a defining story in the Star Trek mythos. The real challenge would be replacing Montalblan in the lead role.
5 A Worf/Klingon Empire Solo Movie
Worf was easily one of the most enjoyable aspects of Star Trek: Picard season 3, the enlightened space monk who still lopped off people’s heads with very little provocation. However, due to the nature of the season’s story, not much time was spent on what exactly Worf’s been doing the last two decades. When audiences last left him, he was an important advisor to Klingon Chancellor Martok (J.G. Hertzler) following the Dominion War. Once one of the richest aspects of the Star Trek mythos, the Klingon Empire has been largely unexplored since the disastrous Klingon reinvention in Star Trek: Discovery season 1. It’s time to go back to Kronos.
4 Missing Star Trek: Picard Season 1 And 2 Characters Movie
While Star Trek: Picard season 3 was a triumph, it, unfortunately, came at the cost of most of the show’s newly introduced characters from the first two seasons. A movie centered around positronic relatives Data (Brent Spiner) and Soji (Isa Briones) would be intriguing all on its own, with Data getting to meet his first real relative. It would also be nice to check in with Elnor (Evan Evagora) to see how Starfleet Academy’s first Romulan cadet is faring. The movie could even do some time travel acrobatics to include Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) after he elected to stay in the 21st century at the end of Picard season 2.
3 Young Picard Movie
Star Trek: Picard‘s 3 seasons told the story of Jean-Luc Picard’s (Patrick Stewart) twilight years after Star Trek: The Next Generation, but perhaps it’s time to look backward and chart the young Picard’s more volatile years in a Paramount+ Star Trek movie. There have been plenty of hints that Jean-Luc was a brash young Starfleet Officer when he was fresh out of Starfleet Academy. A movie about the young Picard could tell the story of how he became friends with Jack R. Crusher (Doug Wert) and Beverly Howard, and it could also provide a fascinating parallel to Picard’s son, Jack Crusher’s (Ed Speleers) story in Star Trek: Picard season 3, proving just how similar father and son are.
2 Agnes Jurati Borg Movie
While the likes of Elnor and Soji deserve more stories, the biggest piece of business remaining from Star Trek: Picard season 2 involves the Borg Queen formerly known as Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill). After an alternate reality Borg Queen (Anne Wersching) assimilated Agnes, their two consciousness melded into one, creating a new, more benevolent version of the Borg collective. By the end of Picard season 2, the Jurati Borg were guarding a newly revealed transwarp hub in deep space. Something big and bad is likely going to come through that hub, and a full-on feature-length movie would be a great way to pay off that epic promise.
1 Star Trek 4
It’s become fairly obvious that the movie division of Paramount doesn’t really know what to do with the Kelvin timeline films at this point, with no active pre-production happening on the potential fourth entry. A modest proposal – keep the stellar cast, slash the ridiculous, Marvel-sized budgets, and tell a smart, smaller-scaled story on Paramount+. Star Trek is not really designed to make billions of dollars as an action franchise, part of the reason the Kelvin films eventually fizzled. And yet putting actors as talented as Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto onscreen together is still an electric prospect – it’s just one that might need to be done a little cheaper.
