Star Trek 4 Writers Reveal Chris Pine And Chris Hemsworth Sequel Story
Had it not been scrapped, writers for the Star Trek 4 film starring Chris Pine revealed details of a reunion adventure between Pine's James Kirk and Chris Hemsworth's George Kirk.
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Now that Paramount has removed Star Trek 4 from its upcoming film slate, writers Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne have shared what their Chris Pine-led story would have looked like. Speaking to Esquire, the pair who worked on Star Trek Beyond before creating The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, said the fourth film featured a reunion between Chris Hemsworth’s George Kirk and Pine’s James Kirk.
“The conceit was that through a cosmic quirk, they were the same age,” McKay explained of the Star Trek 4 movie starring Chris Pine. He added that it was going to be a grandfather-son space adventure. Sort of like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in space.
“We were thrilled about it,” he told the publication. The plot, which was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, would also have drawn inspiration from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Relics.”
In the episode, Scotty is found after being trapped in a transporter for a couple of decades. And they’re able to have a cool adventure with him. “Our conceit was, what if right before the Kelvin impacted with that huge mining ship, George Kirk had tried to beam himself over to his wife’s shuttle where his son, Jim Kirk, had just been born?” McKay continued. In doing so, Star Trek 4 would have seen the characters played by Chris Pine and Hemsworth come together for an epic adventure.
The writers explained the glitch in the timeline by likening it to a text message. “Think about when you send a text and you’ve typed it out, but you haven’t quite hit send,” Payne said. “On the recipient’s side, they see those three little dots that someone has typed.” Similarly, the transporter would have absorbed his pattern into the buffer, but wouldn’t really leave him on the other side.
So George Kirk would be trapped mid-teleportation in Star Trek 4, creating an opportunity for him to reunite with his son (Chris Pine). While the writing duo worked on Star Trek 4 for several years, their dream of reuniting Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth won’t be happening any time soon. The project fell apart after director Matt Shakman was successfully courted by Marvel Studios to helm its Fantastic Four reboot.
Additionally, no one from the original cast had signed up for the film when J.J Abrams told attendees at Paramount’s Global Investors Day presentation that the movie would begin filming by the end of the year. With Star Trek 4 off its schedule due to a lack of a director and cast led by Chris Pine, that deadline is no longer looming. But it still leaves Paramount without plans for an entry in its most valuable franchise.
The project has been in development since 2015, as the studio hoped to reunite the crew of the rebooted Enterprise that was first introduced in 2009’s Star Trek. Quentin Tarantino and Noah Hawley were also among the filmmakers who had different takes on the project. However, the studio opted to go forward with Star Trek 4 as a fourth installment to the Chris Pine series of films.
But it’s not all bad news for the franchise as Star Trek is currently enjoying a robust presence on television, with five ongoing series. This includes Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Star Trek: Prodigy, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The latest entry, Strange New Worlds, even takes place roughly in the same period as the Pine and Quinto movies, albeit in a separate timeline.
