The only thing weirder than the fact that Disney hasn’t been able to get a Star Wars movie into theaters for the better part of six years is that Paramount and Star Trek are lapping them comfortably at this point, currently shooting for a full decade of inexplicable franchise inactivity. Not even the combined forces of Chris Pine, Quentin Tarantino, Noah Hawley, and every other big-name creative who’s all but begged Paramount to let them take the Enterprise for a spin since 2016 has been able to counter the distaste apparently left by Star Trek Beyond‘s under-performance, to the point that the new bosses at Paramount indicated lately that they were trashing the Kelvin Timeline as a whole, and setting their phasers for “Reboot… again.”
Today, THR reports that the studio has made moves on that score, tapping John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein to write and direct a new Trek movie, disconnected from all previous continuity. Which is funny, to our eyes, in the sense that Daley and Goldstein’s last movie together, 2023’s Dungeons And Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, feels like exactly the kind of film Paramount seems deeply disinterested in making in this space: A funny, shockingly smart action-adventure that nevertheless utterly cratered at the box office. (The duo has since made one other movie together, an Apple-set Ryan Reynolds/Kenneth Branagh feature called Mayday, that’s yet to secure a release date.)
Besides the general oddness of hiring two of Pine’s recent collaborators to make the movie that will finally, officially, shunt him out of the captain’s chair he’s ostensibly held for 16 years at this point, the basic idea of Daley and Goldstein making a Star Trek movie isn’t offensive or anything; the pair make fun, breezy films, and Honor Among Thieves showed they can work pretty well within genre lines. That being said, it also doesn’t dispel the general vibe that Paramount doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing with this franchise (outside of TV, where things are still going at least semi-smooth, with the upcoming arrival of Holly Hunter’s Star Trek: Starfleet Academy), and has just slapped the self-destruct button yet again and called it good.
