Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Star Trek’ Movie Would Have Been “Balls-Out Hard R”

The Big Picture

• Quentin Tarantino had a pitch for a different kind of Star Trek film that would have been edgier and more violent.
• Tarantino considered making it his final film, but couldn’t wrap his head around ending his career with Star Trek.
• The script for Tarantino’s Star Trek film is still sitting on Mark L. Smith’s desk, but it’s unlikely that it will ever get made.

While it may never see the light of day, we can’t help but imagine what might have made it to the big screen in Quentin Tarantino‘s long-abandoned Star Trek movie. Not exactly known for tales of science and exploration, Tarantino’s movie would have been vastly different from any other installment in the franchise thus far — yes, even Nemesis. During an interview for his upcoming drama The Boys in the Boat screenwriter Mark L. Smith told Collider’s Steve Weintraub about the script he’d worked on with Tarantino for the unlikely sci-fi flick. “So Quentin came in to Bad Robot, we met there, and he had this pitch, this idea of a version of Star Trek that he wanted to make,” said Smith. He went on to say that he was mesmerized by Tarantino’s pitch, noting that he wishes he’d “snuck something in to record as he’s doing his dialogue, and his acting it out is just so wonderful.” But the legendary director “wanted a writer to do it, which wasn’t normal for him. So, we kind of clicked and so they asked me to do it, he and J.J., so I wrote a draft.”

Smith went on to say that while he “wasn’t sure about Star Trek” for himself, Tarantino knew his concept would gel well with Smith’s sensibilities. However, Tarantino couldn’t quite bring himself to make Star Trek his final film, having already determined he would direct 10 movies and then retire. Smith explained:

“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. 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.”

What Would Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Star Trek’ Movie Have Been About?

While Smith didn’t exactly reveal any new plot details, saying “I can’t say anything about the story. He would kill me.” He did reveal that it would’ve been a “Hard R” with violence in the same vein as past Tarantino films like Pulp Fiction. He said:

“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.”

Weintraub noted that the way to go for future Star Trek films may be to focus on a low budget, with hard sci-fi concepts aimed at existing fans of the franchise, and Smith wholeheartedly agreed. But not everyone, behind the franchise appears to be on the same page. Smith explained that “there are different people at different levels where they see it like that, and then others still are holding on to that billion-dollar thing, and it’s to try to find everyone kind of to meet in the middle and do a version of it.”

Smith went on to say that he was excited about his and Tarantino’s project because it would have been so different from the rest of the franchise, saying, “I liked it because I think it’s different, but the way that [Thor] 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.”

It’s unlikely that the movie will ever get made, maybe one day Smith’s script will see the light of day. In the meantime, stay tuned at Collider for the rest of Weintraub’s interview with Smith. You can stream Star Trek on Paramount+.

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