How cool would it have been if we actually had gotten a Quentin Tarantino Star Trek movie? The pop culture enthusiast and iconic filmmaker has never been involved with an existing franchise, so the news that he had been developing a Star Trek feature seemed too good to be true. Now, it seems as if it was never meant to be as the Once Upon A Time In Hollywood director has distanced himself from the project. With WandaVision‘s Matt Shakman helming the next entry in the Kelvin-verse series, Tarantino’s unique take on Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi creation seems done for good.
Developed with screenwriter Mark L. Smith (The Revenant), we are now getting new details about the project from the scribe himself. In speaking with the Bulletproof Writing podcast, Smith revealed how he got involved with Tarantino’s project.
“They just called me and said, ‘Hey, are you up for it? Do you want to go? Quentin wants to hook up.’ And I said, ‘Yeah,’” the screenwriter said. “And that was the first day I met Quentin, in the room and he’s reading a scene that he wrote and it was this awesome cool gangster scene, and he’s acting it out and back and forth. I told him, I was so mad I didn’t record it on my phone. It would be so valuable. It was amazing.”
“Then just we started working,” Smith elaborated. “I would go hang out at his house one night and we would watch old gangster films. We were there for hours. … We were just kicking back watching gangster films, laughing at the bad dialogue, but talking about how it would bleed into what we wanted to do. Kirk’s in it, we’ve got him. All the characters are there. It would be those guys. I guess you would look at it like all the episodes of the show didn’t really connect. So this would be almost its own episode. A very cool episode. There’s a little time travel stuff going on. … It’s really wild.”
Wow! These are words I never thought I’d say, but I’m actually kind of upset that we’ll never get to see Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek. Early reports indicate that Tarantino’s Star Trek would have played like a 1930s crime thriller, and I’ll be damned if that doesn’t sound cool. I’ll tell you this much. It would have made for one hell of a final film in Tarantino’s celebrated career.
Are you upset about Tarantino stepping away from Star Trek, or do you think his time is better spent elsewhere? What about Shakman? Are you excited to see what he comes up with? I’ll be honest, after seeing and loving Marvel’s WandaVision, I’m more than willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
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