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Early rumors suggested that Paramount halted Hawley’s Star Trek movie as it was on the edge of entering production because the plot revolved around a pandemic, which the studio felt hit too close to home. However, Hawley later told Deadline that a changing of the guard at Paramount Pictures, with Emma Watts becoming president, resulted in support for his Star Trek movie, with its unproven new crew, vanishing.
“We were on the runway,” Hawley said. “There was major casting that we were in the middle of. We had a production schedule and I was getting ready to go to Australia. And then, as you said, new management. I guess in retrospect, what surprised me is not that Emma Watts came in and said, ‘Are you people crazy? This is an untested crew. This is an original idea. We don’t know if this is going to work or not work,’ it’s that I got as far as I did under Wyck [Godfrey] and Jim [Gianopulos]. It was a really fun movie and I think it would have been a great film, but you can’t control these things, so you move on.
“It’s not easy,” Hawley continued, “and you have to allow yourself to have that process of, I won’t say grieving because it’s not life or death, but you do have to pour your 40 out on the ground for the movie that would have been, to really celebrate that you were excited artistically about something and now you have to, just as you were getting ready to ramp up, you have to cauterize that wound and move on.
What’s next for the Star Trek movies?
Star Trek 4 has been in development limbo for years, with multiple unrealized projects going through development and writers and directors coming and going. Most recently, Paramount announced that it is developing a Star Trek movie that is an origin story of the Enterprise crew while also pursuing a sequel to that would bring back the cast of the Kelvin Timeline Star Trek movies.
Meanwhile, Paramount+ is moving forward with direct-to-streaming Star Trek movies. The first, Star Trek: Section 31, starring Michelle Yeoh, began filming in Toronto in January. Patrick Stewart also recently revealed he was expecting to receive a script for a new Star Trek movie starring the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew. Whether that’s meant for Paramount+ or theaters is unclear.
