Quentin Tarantino's Unmade Star Trek Would Have Been the "Greatest Star Trek Film" According to Writer

Quentin Tarantino's proposed Star Trek project may be the best Star Trek movie never to be made. Mark L. Smith wrote the screenplay for the Star Trek movie based on Tarantino's story idea, which Tarantino had intended to direct. However, Tarantino has since drifted away from the project and shifted focus to The Movie Critic, which he intends to be his 10th and final film. Smith has moved on to writing The Boys in the Boat, a new movie directed by George Clooney. While promoting that project, he spoke to Collider about the Tarantino Star Trek movie, saying he believed it would have been the best movie in the franchise.

"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 said. "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 things 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 goes into more detail about the Tarantino Star Trek movie, saying it would indeed have been "Pulp Fiction in space." He also compares it to Thor: Ragnarok and Guardians of the Galaxy, suggesting it would have bucked expectations of what a Star Trek movie could be in much the same way those movies altered expectations of what Marvel's films could be.

"But I think his vision was just to go hard. It was a hard R. It was going to be some Pulp Fiction violence," Smith said. "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.

"I liked it because I think it's different, but the way that Ragnarok changed things. It was like suddenly it had a different feel for the Marvel stuff. 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."

Paramount's next theatrical Star Trek movie continues to be stuck in development limbo, going through different scripts and directorial visions for what the film should be. The most recent iteration had Matt Shakman directing from Lindsey Beer and Geneva Robertson-Dworet's script. Those plans were scrapped when Shakman departed to helm Marvel Studios' Fantastic Four reboot. Star Trek 4 is not currently on Paramount's release schedule.