Quentin Tarantino Passed On Directing ‘Star Trek’ Film Because He Didn’t Want That Movie To Be His Last

Quentin Tarantino was close to directing a bloodier Star Trek movie but opted out of making it because he didn’t want that to be his last film.

Writer Mark L. Smith is now opening up about the hesitation Tarantino had about directing the fourth installment of the film franchise that started with J.J. Abrams’ 2019 reboot.

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“Quentin and I went back and forth, he was gonna do some stuff on it, and then he started worrying about the number, his kind of unofficial number of films,” Smith told Collider in an interview. “I remember we were talking, and he goes, ‘If I can just wrap my head around the idea that Star Trek could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?'”

Smith continued, “And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk. I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those that I can’t ever see happening. But it would be the greatest Star Trek film, not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was just a balls-out kind of thing.”

Tarantino has been open about wanting to retire from directing after completing ten films with The Movie Critic set to potentially be his last. Smith noted that Tarantino’s take on Star Trek would’ve been rated with a “Hard R.”

“I think his vision was just to go hard. It was a hard R. It was going to be some Pulp Fiction violence,” Smith added. “Not a lot of the language, we saved a couple things for just special characters to kind of drop that into the Star Trek world, but it was just really the edginess and the kind of that Tarantino flair, man, that he was bringing to it. It would have been cool.”

News of a fourth Star Trek film date back to 2016 when it was announced that Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Bad Robot were going to continue collaborating on another installment ahead of the release of Star Trek: Beyond.

Tarantino’s involvement in the franchise would be reported the following year when it was announced a the director had an idea for the next installment. Reports also mentioned that Tarantino required the film to be rated R, as Smith confirmed in his recent interview.

Although hopes are low that the Tarantino vision for Star Trek would get made, Smith said that it would’ve been a game-changer for the franchise.

“I liked it because I think it’s different, but the way that [Thor] Ragnarok changed things. It was like suddenly it had a different feel for the Marvel stuff,” he said. “It was like, ‘That’s fun. That’s different.’ And I guess Guardians [of the Galaxy] to some level, but it was just like a different vibe and that’s what I thought that it could bring to Star Trek was just a different feel.”

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