Star Trek’s Unmade ‘Justice League’ Film Details Revealed
All Star Trek fans know that the TNG films ended after the commercial and critical failure of Nemesis, the fourth movie that brought Captain Picard to the big screen. However, Paramount once had plans for a follow-up to that movie, which would have been wildly ambitious. It was going to bring back Shinzon, Khan, Kirk, Spock, Archer, and even Data, and Brent Spiner described this as Star Trek’s version of the Justice League.
Assembling An All-Star Squad
The idea of assembling a rag-tag group of Star Trek characters into an ersatz Justice League is pretty fascinating. As some fans know, this is already happening with IDW’s Defiant comic, where Worf steals the titular Starfleet vessel and assembles a crew consisting of Ro Laren, Spock, B’Elanna Torres, and even Lore. It’s the kind of bonkers concept that feels natural in a comic book, but it’s wild to think that Paramount almost brought an even zanier version of this concept to theaters years ago.
Uniting The Villains
What would the plot of this Star Trek “Justice League” film have been? Brent Spiner didn’t share too many details, but the movie was going to have some kind of inciting event that brought “all the great Star Trek villains together.” The only ones that he named specifically were Khan and Shinzon, but it’s tantalizing to think that the film might have also brought in classic bad guys like General Chang or the Borg Queen (after all, Star Trek never wastes an opportunity to bring the Borg back).
Picard Brings Them Together
All of these villains somehow joining together is enough for Star Trek icon Captain Picard to assemble his Justice League of do-gooders, and he has to use time travel to do so. Traveling time allows him to get anyone from any point in franchise history, allowing him to rescue Data before his unexpected sacrifice in Nemesis. More surprisingly, though, Picard would have recruited Captain Archer from Enterprise as well as Original Series icons Kirk and Spock.
The Practical Roadblock
If you’ve been mentally adding up how much it would have cost to bring in William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Tom Hardy to an already star-studded film, then you’ve probably figured out why this Star Trek Justice League movie never got made.
As Spiner rhetorically asked while describing the film, “The problem with that more than anything is cost – how do you pay for that?” While the actor is completely right about this, we can’t help but think this film, if completed, would have been even worse than Nemesis.
Overshadowing The TNG Cast
Fans largely hated that movie because of Shinzon, and this Star Trek Justice League film would bring back a villain the audience already despises while immediately undermining Data’s sacrifice from the previous movie.
Plus, the presence of big names like Shatner and Nimoy would arguably demean the importance of the main cast…this was meant to be Captain Picard’s final onscreen adventure, but it wouldn’t even feel like a TNG film thanks to the outsize presence of Kirk and Spock. Such a movie would have come out only a few years before Ricardo Montalban’s death, requiring the same kind of Khan recasting that sunk Star Trek Into Darkness.
Laid The Groundwork For The Kelvinverse
On a sliding scale of undeveloped Star Trek projects, this Justice League idea is notable for its ambition and scope. In reality, though, it would have been just awful…if Nemesis was the final nail in the coffin, this follow-up would just be setting the entire corpse of the franchise on fire. Fortunately, Paramount was wise enough to let the franchise run fallow for a few years, allowing Star Trek (2009) to become a monster hit that (ahem) re-energized the fanbase.
