Quentin Tarantino intended to direct an R-rated Star Trek movie, but the Pulp Fiction auteur decided he didn’t want Star Trek 4 to be his last film. Tarantino has stated that he has plans to retire from directing after ten films, and it seems he had mixed feelings about Star Trek being his last outing. Although Tarantino’s idea for Star Trek was undoubtedly interesting, it never got past the scripting stage. Tarantino did work with The Revenant director Mark L. Smith to write a script based on his idea, but the film never made it any further than that.
In an interview with Collider about The Boys in the Boat, screenwriter Mark L. Smith spoke about the script he had developed with Quentin Tarantino for Star Trek 4. Smith reveals that Tarantino worried about Star Trek being his 10th and final film, and he backed away because the director couldn’t reconcile Star Trek 4 as the last movie he ever makes. Read his full quote below:
“It was a different thing, but this was such a particular different type of story that Quentin wanted to tell with it that it fit my kind of sensibilities. So I wrote that, Quentin and I went back and forth, he was gonna do some stuff on it, and then he started worrying about the number, his kind of unofficial number of films. I remember we were talking, and he goes, ‘If I can just wrap my head around the idea that Star Trek could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?’ And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk. I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those that I can’t ever see happening. But it would be the greatest Star Trek film, not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was just a balls-out kind of thing.”
Chris Pine’s Star Trek Movies Explained
Chris Pine stars as Captain James T. Kirk in J.J. Abrams’ Kelvin Timeline Star Trek reboot movies, including Into Darkness and Star Trek: Beyond.
Quentin Tarantino’s Hard R Star Trek Movie Explained
Tarantino’s Star Trek was an homage to TOS’ “A Piece of the Action”.
Quentin Tarantino’s pitch for a Star Trek film took inspiration from Star Trek: The Original Series season 2, episode 17, “A Piece of the Action.” This classic Trek episode follows Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) as they masquerade as gangsters on a planet whose culture is based on the gangster culture of 1920s Chicago. While little information has been revealed about the script written based on Tarantino’s idea, Mark L. Smith confirmed that it would have followed in the footsteps of Tarantino’s other movies when it came to the film’s rating. Smith said:
“But I think his vision was just to go hard. It was a hard R. It was going to be some Pulp Fiction violence. Not a lot of the language, we saved a couple things for just special characters to kind of drop that into the Star Trek world, but it was just really the edginess and the kind of that Tarantino flair, man, that he was bringing to it. It would have been cool.”
Since Quentin Tarantino first mentioned the idea of doing a Star Trek film, fan reaction has been mixed. Tarantino’s tendency to explore some of humanity’s worst traits directly contrasts with Star Trek’s optimistic view of humanity and its future, meaning his film would likely have been very different from any previous Trek outing. While the script for the film is still out there, it seems unlikely the film will ever get made. Paramount reportedly still wants to make a long-awaited sequel to 2016’s Star Trek Beyond with Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk and the rest of the cast, but Star Trek 4 remains elusive.
