In a recently published Esquire interview with Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, the pair for the first time shed new light on their plans for a previously canceled Star Trek 4 film set in the Kelvin Timeline. The film had been in development with director S. J. Clarkson (Dexter, Ugly Betty) but eventually, after the scripting phase, all news about the project slowed to a crawl before ending completely.
Until this interview, all that was really known about the movie was Chris Hemsworth was to return as Captain Kirk’s father. “The conceit was that through a cosmic quirk in the Star Trek world, they were the same age” said McKay. “It was going to be a grand father-son space adventure–think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in space.”
The movie was to feature an original villain with a “really cool 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque sci-fi idea at the core.” The writing pair teamed with Lindey Weber, who is also now an executive producer on Rings of Power, but the movie just “fell apart.”
In the interview, Payne also revealed how Chris Pine’s Captain Jim Kirk comes to wind up interacting with Hemsworth’s George Kirk. “There’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Relics where they find Scotty, who’s been trapped on a transporter for a couple of decades, and they’re able to have a cool adventure with him,” Payne said. “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?”
Adds McKay, “The adventure is that Chris Pine and the crew of the Enterprise have to seek out the wreckage of the ship that his father died on because of a mystery and a new villain. 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.”
A new Star Trek film set in the Kelvin Timeline is to enter production later this year.
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