New Star Trek movie prequel in the works from Andor director

Deadline reports that Paramount is developing another new Star Trek movie. They’ve tapped Star Wars: Andor director Toby Haynes to helm the project, with Seth Grahame-Smith writing the script and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot producing.

Plot details are being kept under wraps, but Deadline hears that this is another prequel that will take place decades before the events of the 2009 Star Trek movie. The long-awaited Star Trek 4 with the Abrams crew is still in active development, with Deadline referring to it as the “final chapter” of the main series.

Although the Star Trek franchise has been thriving on the small screen with Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Paramount has been struggling to get another movie off the ground. The last one released was Star Trek Beyond in 2016, and by the time another movie does hit theaters, an entire decade could have passed.

The road to Star Trek 4 has been long, with J.J. Abrams first announcing it just before the release of Star Trek Beyond. The version of the sequel would have brought back Chris Hemsworth as George Kirk, the father of Chris Pine’s James Kirk. J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay had signed on to write the script, with S.J. Clarkson set to direct, but the project was shelved when negotiations with Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth fell apart. The project was revived with WandaVision‘s Matt Shakman set to direct, but he departed to direct Fantastic Four for Marvel, and Paramount ultimately removed the project from their schedule. There was also another Star Trek movie in development from Fargo‘s Noah Hawley, but the studio shelved that one as well.

Of course, there was also the Quentin Tarantino Star Trek movie. Screenwriter Mark L. Smith recently said that the project “would be the greatest Star Trek film,” adding that it would have been a hard-R movie. “I think his vision was just to go hard. It was a hard R,” Smith said. “It was going to be some Pulp Fiction violence. 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.“

So… until this new Star Trek movie starts shooting, and maybe not even then, I’ll believe it when I see it.