Patrick McKay and John D. Payne’s attempt at a fourth film in the rebooted series would have been Indiana Jones and the Last Space Crusade.
Despite the box office success of JJ Abrams’ “Star Trek” films, the legendary sci-fi franchise has focused exclusively on television for the past half decade. After 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, Paramount initially planned further sequels to the Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto-led franchise, with everyone from Quentin Tarantino to Noah Hawley trying out script ideas. But none of them ever materialized, and for now it seems Trekkies will have to settle for the cornucopia of series currently streaming on Paramount+.
But in the spirit of Marvel-induced multiverse madness, that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to ask… “What if?” In a new interview with Esquire, Patrick McKay and John D. Payne, collaborators on “Star Trek Beyond ‘ worked before they created The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, talked about a sequel they wrote that never made it into production.
“We’ve worked on a couple of ‘Star Trek’ movies. The one you’re asking about would have been the fourth in the franchise to reunite Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pine,” McKay said. “The conceit was that by some cosmic quirk they were the same age in the ‘Star Trek’ world. It was going to be a great father-son space adventure – think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in space. We were very happy about it.”
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The writers added that the storyline, which was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, also drew an idea from one of their favorite Star Trek television episodes.
“There’s an episode of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ called ‘Relics’ where they find Scotty who was trapped in a transporter for a couple of decades and they get to have a cool adventure with him,” he said Payne. “Our conceit was, ‘What if George Kirk had tried to beam himself to his wife’s shuttle, where his son Jim Kirk had just been born, just before the Kelvin crashed into this giant mining ship? And what if the ship hadn’t completely exploded — what if it left space debris behind?’”
This error in the timeline would have caused George Kirk of Hemsworth to be caught mid-teleportation, giving him an opportunity to reunite with his son.
“Keep that in mind when you’re sending a text message and you’ve typed it but didn’t quite click send,” Payne said. “On the other side, you see these three little dots that someone typed. It’s as if the transporter took its pattern into the pattern buffer but didn’t spit it out the other side. It was actually a saved copy of him that was on the computer.”
Unfortunately, although they’ve been working on the project for several years, it looks like the dream of reuniting Pine and Hemsworth on screen isn’t going to materialize anytime soon.
“The film ended up falling apart and it was really a heartbreak for us,” Payne said. “We would have loved to have made this film.”
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