Christopher McQuarrie Is Open To A ‘Star Trek’ Film & Says The Franchise Has Forgotten “The Tenets Of The Series”

Christopher McQuarrie is the gift that keeps on giving. Not only is he a talented writer and director, with the last two “Mission: Impossible” films proving that. But he’s also a rare, honest person in Hollywood willing to take questions and not dodge them or dance around an answer. But instead, the director doesn’t hold back and gives you an honest look into how he decides his projects and what he would do with others, if given the opportunity. That’s exactly what happened recently, when he was asked about “Star Trek.”

Now, at first, you might wonder why Collider asked McQuarrie about “Star Trek” in a recent Q&A. With the filmmaker’s name being bandied about for just about every major franchise around, he was, of course, asked about helming a feature film based on “Star Trek,” considering the recent news about not one, but two films being developed currently.

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First, the obvious question, would he even be interested? And if so, would he rather tackle the franchise on the big screen or TV, where “Star Trek” really was able to explore its storylines in a meaningful way?

“Yeah, probably a feature. Probably, yeah, a feature. I feel like ‘Star Trek’ is kind of… it’s gone away from what the tenants [sic] of the series were about, which was kind of the hope and the promise and the science,” McQuarrie said.

Many ‘Trek’ fans would agree with the filmmaker’s assessment of the current state of the franchise. While the original series and subsequent spin-offs on TV delved into the idea of how a utopian space society would deal with existential questions and scientific discovery, most of the modern iterations (the 3 new films and recent TV series) seem to be more concentrated on heavy action and interpersonal drama. That isn’t to say the recent material is somehow bad, because by and large, the films have been good, but these new adaptations feel less and less like “Star Trek.”

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So, how would McQuarrie fix that? Considering that the four-quadrant action film version of “Star Trek” has seen diminishing returns in recent years, it wouldn’t make huge financial sense for a studio to throw $200 million at the filmmaker to put the “science” back into sci-fi.

He explains:

“It’s simple math, you know what you have to do with ‘Star Trek?’ You have to make ‘Star Trek’ for a domestic audience. ‘Star Trek’ does better domestically than it does internationally, so I would come to ‘Star Trek,’ and go, ‘Realistically, how much money should I make this ‘Star Trek’ movie for?’ And you’d give me a budget, and I’d go off and make the movie. That’s what I would do. You look at any movie like that, if you just be honest with yourself about the economics, it’s just a very real part of doing that.”

There you go, with McQuarrie answering a question honestly and appropriately. Unlike the modern studio idea of making every sequel bigger and somehow “better” (which normally correlates to a bigger budget), the filmmaker says to take a step back and be more realistic. Then you focus on the core fans and the core tenets of the original Gene Roddenberry idea.

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Of course, this is clearly all highly hypothetical as it appears the “bigger = better” idea seems to be the way Paramount is going with the franchise. Oh well. Maybe McQuarrie can fix another franchise in the meantime?