Quentin Tarantino didn’t want “hard R” Star Trek to be his final movie

The thought of a Quentin Tarantino Star Trek movie always felt like a pipe dream to me, and while the project didn’t move ahead, I am surprised it got as close as it did. Screenwriter Mark L. Smith (The Boys in the Boat) was brought in to write the script based on Tarantino’s ideas, and he recently told Collider that it would have been a “hard R” movie filled with Tarantino’s typical flair.

“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.“

Smith also implies that Quentin Tarantino might have moved ahead with the Star Trek movie if it weren’t for the self-imposed limit on his filmography. “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 explained. “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?’ And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk.” While Smith hopes it gets made one of these days, he just doesn’t see it happening, which is a shame because he claims it “would be the greatest Star Trek film.“

As it stands now, Quentin Tarantino’s tenth and final movie will be The Movie Critic, which is said to be set in the late 1970s in Los Angeles. “I think when it comes to theatrical movies, I’ve come to the end of the road,” Quentin Tarantino said in 2019. “I see myself writing books and starting to write theatre, so I’ll still be creative. I just think I’ve given all I have to give to movies.” Tarantino has previously said that his final movie would likely be more “epilogue-y” than what he’s done before. “If you think about the idea of all the movies telling one story, and each film is like a train boxcar, connected to each other, this one would sort of be the big show-stopping climax of it all,” Tarantino said. “And I could imagine that the 10th one would be a little more epilogue-y.“