New Star Trek Movie Announced, Beginning Of The End?

Ever since Paramount completed its merger with Skydance, fans have wondered what was next for Star Trek, the studio’s biggest IP. Now, Deadline reports that Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley will be writing, producing, and directing a new Star Trek film that will be completely disconnected from any shows or movies that have come before.

While the urge to create something completely new is understandable, Paramount is really playing with phaser fire here because a Trek film without connections to the rest of the franchise is destined to become a bona fide box office bomb.

NuTrek, Meet New Trek

According to Deadline, sources claim that the new Star Trek movie is “not connected to any previous or current television series, movie, or prior movie development projects.” The publication noted that even though this information is not yet confirmed, “it’s likely that new characters will be featured in this version.” It seems that Paramount wants to relaunch its most famous franchise from the ground up; unfortunately, they have chosen to do so in a way guaranteed to drive the franchise into the ground.

Last time the franchise got a major reboot like this, it was through 2009’s Star Trek, which took place in an entirely different universe. That gave the creative team involved an excuse to disregard most of the previous lore to make a funnier, faster-paced movie out of this serious, slower-paced IP. But they had a secret weapon on their side: the movie was filled with some of the most recognizable characters in pop culture history.

Star Trek: The Original Series barely lasted three seasons on the air in the 1960s, but reruns made it an unexpected hit with college students in the 1970s. This kicked off a series of revival movies that lasted into the ‘90s. Long story not very short, all of this media saturation ensured that multiple generations of voracious consumers grew up knowing who Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the Enterprise crew were.

The Paramount Paradox

That leads to the paradox that modern Paramount executives don’t seem to appreciate: younger, casual audiences who didn’t grow up watching Star Trek are still likelier to see a movie featuring characters they are at least somewhat familiar with. To them, these might just be characters their parents grew up watching, or characters they recognize from memes or silly YouTube comedy videos. Nonetheless, when a new Star Trek movie came out, younger audiences were eager to see what these famous characters were all about, even as older audiences were eager to see how well (or how poorly) their favorite science fiction franchise was being handled.

All of that made Star Trek (2009) a monster hit that got two sequels and effectively kickstarted a new era for the franchise. Now, Paramount wants to make a new Trek film that ignores all of these years of NuTrek momentum by severing any connections to those shows, and they are doing so with characters that nobody has ever heard of. Simply put, this is the worst of both worlds: established fans will hate that this movie has turned its back on decades of lore, while casual audiences will ignore the latest film in this nearly 60-year-old franchise because it has no recognizable characters.

Paramount has assembled a really great creative team for this new Star Trek movie: Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley wrote Spider-Man: Homecoming (one of the best movies in the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe) and directed Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (an insanely great adaptation of the most popular tabletop game in the world). They obviously have the talent to deliver a fast-paced movie full of great jokes, thrilling action, and epic setpieces. But if the studio insists on making the new Star Trek movie another reboot, this one filled with nameless sci-fi heroes, then this attempted revival could be the beginning of the end for sci-fi’s greatest franchise.