Quentin Tarantino, J.J. Abrams Reportedly Teaming up for ‘Star Trek’ Pitch

According to numerous reports, legendary director Quentin Tarantino is teaming up with J.J. Abrams to pitch a new Star Trek film to Paramount Pictures.

According to Deadline, Tarantino and Abrams are planning “to assemble a writers’ room of scribes who’ll hear Tarantino’s take and begin to put together a movie. If it all works out, Tarantino might direct it, with Abrams producing.”

A later report in Entertainment Weekly confirmed the film would in fact be R-Rated, a first for the long-running sci-fi franchise. The magazine also shed light on the potential creative process for the film, writing, “Screenwriters Mark L. Smith (The Revenant), Lindsey Beer (the upcoming Kingkiller Chronicle), and Drew Pearce (Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation) are in the running to pen the script, with Smith as the apparent frontrunner. The plan is for Tarantino to direct.”

Tarantino, an avowed fan of the franchise, spoke about how he would approach working on Trek on a 2015 episode of the Nerdist podcast. “The only thing that limited them was their ’60s budget and eight-day shooting schedule,” he said at the time.

He went on to praise such classic episodes as Star Trek’s “City on the Edge of Forever” and Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise” as being worthy of the film treatment. “You could take some of the classic Star Trek episodes and easily expand them to 90 minutes or more and really do some amazing, amazing stuff.”

Tarantino’s potential involvement in the franchise could be a boon to the 51-year-old sci-fi franchise’s cinematic arm, which has struggled in recent years. While 2009’s Star Trek reboot film from J.J. Abrams was a massive success, it’s 2012 sequel Star Trek Into Darkness was met with derision from many fans and critics. In 2016, director Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond was received much more warmly, but was the lowest earner of the “Abramsvere” trilogy, putting the film series’ future in doubt.

Both Tarantino and Abrams have major projects on the horizon. The former is working on a film about the Charles Manson murders scheduled for release in 2019, while the latter has Star Wars Episode IX scheduled for release that December.

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