The Rings of Power Showrunners Details Their Scrapped Star Trek Script Starring Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth

The Rings of Power showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay are opening up on their scrapped Star Trek 4 script for the first time. Before Amazon hired Payne and McKay as showrunners on The Lord of the Rings streaming series, Payne and McKay penned a script for Star Trek 4 that would have reunited Capt. James T. Kirk, played by Chris Pine, with his father, George Kirk. Chris Hemsworth played George in the opening moments of the 2009 Star Trek reboot movie and would have returned to the role for Star Trek 4. However, the film fell apart over contract negotiations, and Paramount abandoned Payne and McKay's script.

"I would love to tell you about it," McKay told Esquire. "We worked on a couple of Star Trek movies. The one you're asking about would have been the fourth in the franchise, reuniting Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pine. The conceit was that through a cosmic quirk in the Star Trek world, they were the same age. It was going to be a grand father-son space adventure—think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in space. We were really thrilled about it."

McKay said the film had a "2001: A Space Odyssey-esque sci-fi idea at the core" and would have featured a brand new villain. "We worked on it for two and half years with Lindsey Weber, our non-writing executive producer on Rings of Power, and an amazing director, S.J. Clarkson," he says. "The movie eventually fell apart and it really was a heartbreak for us…we would have loved to make that movie. I want to spoil a piece of it that's exciting—how they end up together. Can we do that, JD?"

Payne jumped in to say, "There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called 'Relics' where they find Scotty, who's been trapped a transporter for a couple of decades, and they're able to have cool adventure with him. Our conceit was, 'What if right before the Kelvin impacted with that huge mining ship, George Kirk had tried to beam himself over to his wife's shuttle where his son, Jim Kirk, had just been born? And what if the ship hadn't completely exploded—what if it left some space junk?'"

"Think about when you send a text message and you've typed it out, but you haven't quite hit send," he continued. "On the other side, they see those three little dots that someone has typed. It's like the transporter had absorbed his pattern up into the pattern buffer, but hadn't spit him out on the other side. It was actually a saved copy of him that was in the computer."

Finally, McKay said, "So the adventure is that Chris Pine and the crew of the Enterprise have to seek out the wreckage of the ship that his father died on because of a mystery and a new villain. In the ship, they stumble across his father's pattern. They beam him out and he has no idea that no time has passed at all, and that he's looking at his son. Then the adventure goes from there."

After scrapping Payne and McKay's version of the movie, Paramount moved on to film ideas by Noah Hawley and Quentin Tarantino, but neither has materialized. Most recently, WandaVision's Matt Shakman was to direct a new version of Star Trek 4. He abandoned the project to return to Marvel Studios and helm Fantastic Four, leading to Paramount removing Star Trek 4 from its schedule.