Quentin Tarantino‘s scrapped “Star Trek” film might have been the casualty of being Tarantino’s 10th movie.
The director, who announced his 10th and allegedly final film as “The Critic,” previously hinted at a possible R-rated “Star Trek” film installment, written by “The Boys in the Boat” screenwriter Mark L. Smith. Smith has called the script a space-set “gangster movie” and now revealed to Collider that the film was going to have “Pulp Fiction”-level violence. However, Tarantino opted not to have his final movie be one he did not write and also a franchise film. Tarantino has long promised to pivot his career after completing 10 feature films.
“Quentin and I went back and forth, he was gonna do some stuff on it, and then he started worrying about the number, his kind of unofficial number of films,” Smith recalled. “I remember we were talking, and he goes, ‘If I can just wrap my head around the idea that “Star Trek” could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?’ And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk.”
Smith continued, “I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those that I can’t ever see happening. But it would be the greatest ‘Star Trek’ film, not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was just a balls-out kind of thing.”
Smith detailed how Tarantino met with him at J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot productions to detail the kind of “Star Trek” film he envisioned.
“So Quentin came into Bad Robot, we met there, and he had this pitch, this idea of a version of ‘Star Trek’ that he wanted to make. His acting it out is just so wonderful,” Smith said, noting that Tarantino “wanted a writer to do it, which wasn’t normal for him. So, we kind of clicked, and so they asked me to do it, he and J.J., so I wrote a draft.”
Smith explained, “It was a different thing, but this was such a particular different type of story that Quentin wanted to tell with it that it fit my kind of sensibilities. […] I think his vision was just to go hard. It was a hard R. It was going to be some ‘Pulp Fiction’ violence. Not a lot of the language, we saved a couple things for just special characters to kind of drop that into the ‘Star Trek’ world, but it was just really the edginess and the kind of that Tarantino flair, man, that he was bringing to it. It would have been cool.”
Smith added that the unmade film could have changed the franchise, akin to Taika Waititi’s “Thor: Ragnarok” MCU installment.
“I liked it because I think it’s different, but the way that [‘Thor’] ‘Ragnarok’ changed things. It was like suddenly it had a different feel for the Marvel stuff,” Smith said. “It was like, ‘That’s fun. That’s different.’ And I guess ‘Guardians’ [‘of the Galaxy’] to some level, but it was just like a different vibe and that’s what I thought that it could bring to ‘Star Trek’ was just a different feel.”
