For a guy who happily turned TV into a psychedelic sandbox with “Fargo” and “Legion,” Noah Hawley always sounded like an unnervingly good fit for “Star Trek.” On a new episode of the SmartLess podcast, the writer/director walked through what happened to the ‘Trek’ movie he almost made — an entirely written, prepped project that had stages booked in Australia — and how a new regime at Paramount decided they needed a safer “transition” out of Chris Pine’s Enterprise instead.
Hawley said it all started when his first feature pushed him toward something bigger. “I signed on, you know, after ‘Lucy in the Sky’; I thought, ‘Oh, I like this movie thing,’” he told the hosts. “I’d like to do another one, but I think maybe I’d like to try something a little bigger.”
READ MORE: Noah Hawley Says His ‘Star Trek’ Movie Would Have Starred Cate Blanchett & Rami Malek
That immediately meant franchises, something easily greenlit and something studios are always eager for. “You know it’s all franchises and I thought, yeah, but everything’s war, right?” he said. “‘Star Wars’ is war, and Marvel is war. But ‘Star Trek’ isn’t war. ‘Star Trek’ is exploration, right? It’s people solving problems by being smarter than the other guy.”
To explain the version he wanted to make, he went straight to the one scene that defined the whole tone in his head. “The best moment from ‘Star Trek’ is in ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan’ where Shatner puts on his reading glasses and lowers the shields on the other ship,” Hawley said. “It costs like 45 cents, right? But it’s like, you see, oh, he’s smarter than Khan, he’s…”
That became the compass for his pitch. “And so I went in, I talked to Paramount, I sold them this original idea,” he said. “It wasn’t Chris Pine, it wasn’t anything. I wrote it, they said, ‘We love it, let’s prep it.’ We were, you know, we were… I was going to move to Australia, we were booking stages, whatever…”
Then, he said, the usual Hollywood plot twist kicked in. “And then, you know, as happens in Hollywood, Jim Gianopulos, who was running the studio at the time, he’s like, ‘I’m going to bring in somebody else under me, and they’re going to take over the film studio,’” Hawley recalled. “And the first thing they did was kill the original ‘Star Trek’ movie because they said, ‘Well, how do we know people are going to like it?’”
What replaced that enthusiasm, in his telling, was pure risk management. “Like, you know, ‘Shouldn’t we do a transition movie from Chris Pine[’s cast], play it safe, you know, whatever?’” Hawley said. “And so it kind of went away.”
Still, he made it very clear this particular ‘Trek’ hadn’t left his system. “I mean, I talked to David Ellison recently,” Hawley said. “And I was like, ‘You still haven’t made a ‘Star Trek’ movie. I’m just saying it’s in there. I love it.’”
And if that sounded like just another unmade draft gathering dust, previous comments turned it into a much bigger what-if. In early 2024, Hawley mentioned that he was circling a cast led by Cate Blanchett and Rami Malek, joking, “You could have had that, America… planet Earth.” In other words, the scrapped “exploration, not war” Trek he described on SmartLess wasn’t just a pitch; it was a full script with stages booked, a move to Australia looming, and an A-list ensemble almost ready to board — right up until the studio decided they needed one more “safe” trip with Pine’s crew first.
Maybe nudge David Ellison to look at that script one more time? Listen to the whole podcast conversation below.
