Amid the flurry of scheduling moves Paramount Pictures made on Friday, the studio announced a new release date for a Star Trek movie. The still-untitled movie will hit theaters on June 9, 2023. Next to nothing is known about the project, as Paramount just picked Kalinda Vazquez to write a new script last month.
Back on March 4, Deadline confirmed Vazquez was hired to write the next Star Trek movie, which will be produced by J.J. Abrams‘ Bad Robot. Vazquez previously wrote episodes of the Paramount+ series Star Trek: Discovery and was also a co-executive producer on Fear The Walking Dead. She is also working on an HBO adaptation of Roger Zelany’s novel Roadmarks with Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. Vazquez’s ties to Star Trek are deep, as her parents named her after Kelinda, a character seen in the original Star Trek series episode “By Any Other Name.”
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The new movie will be the first Star Trek film since Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond opened in 2016. Although that film earned a warm reception, it was a box office disappointment for Paramount. There have been several attempts to get another movie off the ground since Beyond opened, but nothing has gone very far. At one point, Quentin Tarantino developed a Star Trek project for Paramount, but that stalled. Noah Hawley, who developed FX’s Fargo, also developed a project, but Hawley told Deadline Paramount decided to go in another direction.
It’s not clear if Vazquez’s script will be set in the Kelvin timeline or somewhere else in the Star Trek universe. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek established a new timeline, featuring Chris Pine as Captain James T. Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Commander Spock, Karl Urban as McCoy, and Zoe Saldana as Uhura. The crew was also featured in Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness (2012). In a recent interview with PopCulture, Quinto said he would be interested in returning to the franchise if asked.
“Honestly, I have no real idea what’s going on with Star Trek. [But] we all love each other and we all love that experience and I’m sure if it comes back around and we’re all available, I’m sure we’d be happy to jump back on board. No pun intended,” Quinto the actor explained. “But I don’t know — that’s in other people’s hands and I know I, for one, have had sort of moved on in terms of any kind of expectations, but you never know things come back in surprising ways and it’s surprising times, and it could be fun if it happens.”
While Paramount has struggled to get another Star Trek movie off the ground, the opposite has been the case when it comes to the franchise’s original medium, television. In addition to Star Trek: Discovery, Paramount+ is also home to Picard, the upcoming Discovery spinoff Strange New Worlds, and the animated series Lower Decks.
