New Report Indicates That J.J. Abrams' 'Star Trek' Films Are Dead At Paramount

A new report indicates that J.J. Abrams’ Kevlin timeline of Star Trek films is dead at Paramount following the company’s purchase by David Ellison and Skydance Media.

Variety’s Tatiana Siegel, Brent Lang, and Matt Donnelly report that Ellison and his team want a “fresh Star Trek movie” and that they have “moved on from the idea of bringing back Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and the rest of the ensemble from the J.J. Abrams reboot.”

A fourth film in the Kelvin timeline has been in development for almost a decade. While promoting the franchise’s third film, Star Trek Beyond, Abrams told Collider, “Yes, and there’s something that hopefully we’re figuratively minutes away from talking about. The answer is 100% yes, and it’s incredibly exciting.”

Scott Mantz also indicated the film would see Chris Hemsworth return to his role as George Kirk.

In December 2017, Paramount hired the now showrunners for Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, to write the script for the fourth film. McKay confirmed the film would see Hemsworth return as George Kirk, “The conceit was that through a cosmic quirk in the Star Trek world, they were the same age. It was going to be a grand father-son space adventure — think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in space. We were really thrilled about it.”

The film hit a major delay in 2018 when there were reports that Pine and Hemsworth were not able to come to an agreement with Paramount over money. However, Hemsworth shared in 2019 he was dissatisfied with the script, “didn’t feel like we landed on a reason to revisit that yet. I didn’t want to be underwhelmed by what I was going to bring to the table.”

In 2021, the film was revived with Paramount signing Matt Shakman to direct based off a new script from Lindsey Beer and Geneva Robertson. The film reportedly stalled out in 2022 with makeup artist James MacKinnon telling TrekMovie, “We were supposed to shoot in the middle of [2022] and it was supposed to come out the following year [2023], but I think a script rewrite went in a different direction.”

Last year, it was reported by Variety that Paramount had tapped Steve Yockey to write a new script for the film with it intended “to be the final chapter for the cast that rebooted the franchise in movie theaters in 2009’s Star Trek.”

Now, with new management it appears this long-gestating film will find its end by never happening.

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