Star Trek's Alex Kurtzman Has a 5 to 10 Year Plan for the Franchise

Star Trek fans, get ready. There's up to a decade of new Star Trek content in the planning. The franchise is now under the guidance of producer Alex Kurtzman. Kurtzman co-created Star Trek: Discovery, the first new Star Trek television series in over a decade. Now he's revealed that Discovery was just the tip of the iceberg. Speaking on Deadline's Crew Call podcast, Kurtzman revealed that he presented CBS with a 5 to 10-year plan for the Star Trek franchise. That plan prioritizes long-term goals over short-term rewards and hopes to breed a new generation of Star Trek fans in a way Star Trek never has before.

"When I went to CBS and I said, 'I think you have a universe here that is very under-utilized, and a fan base that I think is hungry for a lot more,' and I walked them through the plan of what I saw for the next five to ten years of Trek, part of it was kind of premised on the idea that it was gonna take time," Kurtzman said. "What I said was, 'Don't expect us to put the first thing out, and suddenly, you have 100 million new fans. That's not gonna happen. Trek's been around for too long for that to happen.'

"But what we do have is new generations, and what I can tell you is that Trek, in general, finds people when they're about between nine and twelve. It's never reached younger than that. It's never tried to. And to me, that's a hugely missed opportunity, especially because what you're really trying to do is influence hearts and minds with really positive messages about who we can be as a species and as people and what our future is. So why not start young, you know? And not for a cynical reason. Not because you know, hey, let some more toys. Because if you really want Star Trek to reach people, then you've got to start young...But we are definitely seeing just metric proof that the fan base is growing, and it's growing younger, and yet, we're keeping our current fans, and that's great."

The targeting of a younger generation of Star Trek fans is most clear in the upcoming Star Trek animated series on Nickelodeon. That show will be computer animated and feature a cast of younger characters, with a target demographic that skews much younger than any Star Trek series before it.

Are you excited for the next decade of Star Trek? Let us know in the comments!