Star Trek: Former Writer Teases Quentin Tarantino’s “Balls-Out” Movie

Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino plans to make his next movie his final directorial effort, though there was a time when he was considering making a Star Trek movie as his sendoff. Tarantino had been collaborating with writer Mark L. Smith, who recently confirmed that the project would have fallen in line with Tarantino’s history of delivering intense experiences that fully embrace a gritty and graphic tone, which would have made for a “balls-out” Star Trek adventure. Between Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Star Trek: Prodigy, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the franchise has recently been exploring a variety of tones and approaches to the franchise, with Tarantino’s abandoned Star Trek movie likely being another offshoot of the concept as opposed to setting the overall standard for the series.

“It was a different thing, but this was such a particular different type of story that Quentin wanted to tell with it that it fit my kind of sensibilities. So I wrote that, 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 recently recalled to Collider. “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. I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those 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.”

He continued, “But I think his vision was just to go hard. It was a hard R. It was going to be some Pulp Fiction violence. 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.”

Tarantino’s next, and final, directorial effort is expected to be The Movie Critic, though various sources close to the filmmaker have noted that, while he might not be directing any more movies, they don’t believe he will retire from filmmaking altogether. In this sense, it’s possible that he could write or produce any number of projects that are merely directed by other filmmakers.

Stay tuned for updates on the future of the Star Trek franchise.

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