The Star Trek franchise can’t seem to catch a break on the big screen. There have been numerous Star Trek movies in development since the release of Star Trek Beyond almost eight years ago, including one from Fargo creator Noah Hawley. The project was pretty far along before Paramount pulled the plug, and Hawley has revealed that the movie would have starred Cate Blanchett and Rami Malek. Hot damn.
Noah Hawley discussed the Star Trek project on a recent episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, speaking of his tales of “heartbreak” in Hollywood. “Yeah, I mean, I was going to make a Star Trek movie with Cate Blanchett and Rami Malek,” Hawley said. “Could have had that, America.“
It’s unlikely that Cate Blanchett and Rami Malek had officially signed on, but Hawley has previously said that they were in the middle of major casting when the plug was pulled. “We were on the runway. There was major casting that we were in the middle of. We had a production schedule and I was getting ready to go to Australia,” Hawley said. “And then, as you said, new management. I guess in retrospect, what surprised me is not that Emma Watts came in and said, ‘Are you people crazy? This is a this is an untested crew. This is an original idea. We don’t know if this is going to work or not work.’ It’s that I got as far as I did under [former head of Paramount Motion Picture Group] Wyck [Godfrey] and [Paramount President] Jim [Gianopulos]. It was a really fun movie and I think it would have been a great film, but you can’t control these things. So we move on.“
Bits and pieces of the project have emerged since it was axed, including that it would have featured an entirely new crew. “We’re not doing Kirk and we’re not doing Picard,” Hawley said in 2020. “It’s a start from scratch that then allows us to do what we did with ‘Fargo,’ where for the first three hours you go, ‘Oh, it really has nothing to do with the movie,’ and then you find the money. So you reward the audience with a thing that they love.” At the moment, there are several Star Trek movies in development, including Star Trek 4, which will be the “final chapter” of the J.J. Abrams crew, as well as a prequel taking place decades before the 2009 movie set to be helmed by Star Wars: Andor director Toby Haynes.
Cate Blanchett and Rami Malek would have been fun additions to the Star Trek franchise, but… who knows what the future will bring.
