After years with no updates, in 2018 it seemed like the rebooted Star Trek movie franchise was getting back on track. Star Trek 4 was happening again, and the Trek movieverse’s first female director, S.J. Clarkson, was at the helm.
Then, things reportedly got bad with regards to casting. Now, there’s a chance the whole project might be going down like the Enterprise in Star Trek: Generations. Or in Into Darkness. Or Beyond. Take your pick, actually.
Clarkson was just announced as both the pilot director and an executive producer on HBO’s first Game of Thrones spinoff, set thousands of years before the events of the flagship fantasy series.
While that’s good news for HBO and the prequel, according to Deadline, it might represent a big problem for Star Trek’s uncertain future at the box office. See, Deadline notes that the director was snapped up by HBO after recently becoming available…because Star Trek 4 has been shelved:
I hear Clarkson was recruited by HBO for GOT after she recently became available. Earlier this year, Clarkson was the first female director to be tapped to direct a Star Trek movie when she was hired to helm the fourth feature in the current series. That project has since been shelved.
No reason for the surprise scrapping was given. But considering the reports we had last August that contract negotiations for the returning Chris Hemsworth (who would’ve been returning as the deceased father of James Kirk, reprising his minor role from the original reboot film) and Chris Pine (who of course plays the much harder-to-get-around role of James Kirk himself!) had gone south, it’s possible that despite Pine’s own wishes to return to the Enterprise’s bridge, things were never sorted out. And without a Jim Kirk to command, the idea of a Star Trek 4 seems to weird to comprehend at all. Seems like Paramount might have agreed.
We reached out to Paramount reps to clarify the current status of Star Trek 4, and they told us they had no comment at this time. We’ll update this post if we hear more.