“Star Trek” turnover is not particularly rare, and ever since 2016’s “Star Trek Beyond,” the last “Star Trek” movie released theatrically, Paramount has struggled to get a new film off the ground. There was an idea from Quentin Tarantino that “The Revenant” writer Mark L. Smith wrote that never got made, “WandaVision” director Matt Shakman was supposed to make a version of “Star Trek 4,” “Avatar: The Way of Water” writer Josh Friedman & Cameron Squires wrote a version, and “Fargo” showrunner/writer/director Noah Hawley wrote a version that never got made either (a new version is in the works too; potentially two).
And in a new podcast episode of Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast, Hawley revealed that his “Star Trek” movie would have starred Oscar winners Cate Blanchett (“TAR”) and Rami Malek (“Bohemian Rhapsody”).
Hawley didn’t give many details, but in a conversation about perceived “failure,” he briefly mentioned the casting. “Right, I was going to make a ‘Star Trek’ movie with Cate Blanchett and Rami Malek. “You coulda had that, America… Planet Earth,” he said with a tone of dry, biting humor.
“The best advice I can give you is: don’t take it personally,” he said about failure. “If someone doesn’t like your script, it’s not you; it’s not someone saying they don’t like you.”
Hawley gave more context to the series falling apart late last year.
“What I found with ‘Star Trek’ was I got onto the runway, and then there was a managerial changeover. In retrospect, it’s not that they killed the movie,” he explained via THR. “It’s that I got as far as I did with a wholly original idea until someone said, ‘Well, wait a minute, what are we even doing with this valuable IP? Just giving it to him to make up a story? That’s not how corporate filmmaking works.’ So, if the call came in to do a big franchise film again, it would have to come with a sense of, ‘We want you to do your version of it.’ “
“Wholly original” does sound like it wasn’t a proper “Star Trek 4,” and not including the Chris Pine cast.
Talking set-backs, Hawley previously said about his sci-fi astronaut film, “Lucy In The Sky” with Natalie Portman, “I did not have a great experience on that film, unfortunately,” explaining how Fox Searchlight, the distributors at the time didn’t really love it and didn’t know what to make of it.
But on the Dax Shepard pod, he seemingly had a greater perspective about it. [“It’s like], what else can I get away with? Fox Searchlight made ‘Lucy In The Sky,’ it didn’t do well for them, [but], it’s going to exist forever,” he said. “It’s the movie I wanted it to be, so haha, at the end of the day…”
Wonder if that Hawley script would ever leak one day. We’d love to read it. In the meantime, there are five seasons of “Fargo” you could dig into instead. Listen to the entire conversation below.