Nicholas Meyer just gave a masterclass in how you actually save Star Trek, and the timing could not be better.
The director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan sat down with Variety at the Italian Global Series Festival, which is celebrating the franchise’s 60th anniversary and sneak-peeking Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 ahead of its July 23 premiere on Paramount+.
Meyer walked through how the movie widely considered the best Star Trek film ever made actually came together: a bloated predecessor, a television producer with a plan, and a budget of $11.2 million.
It lands at the perfect moment, because as I exclusively reported, the incoming Paramount regime is taking Star Trek back to its Wrath of Khan and Next Generation roots.
How The Wrath of Khan Got Made For $11.2 Million
Meyer recalled that 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a runaway production that cost Paramount $45 million — an enormous number at the time — and still turned a profit.
The studio wanted a sequel, just not at anywhere near that price.
Enter Harve Bennett, the television producer behind Rich Man, Poor Man, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Bionic Woman. Meyer said that when the studio asked whether a better movie could be made for half the money, Bennett’s answer was that he could make five movies for it.
The sequel’s budget came in at around $11.2 million, roughly a quarter of what the first film cost. The result grossed roughly $80 million domestically in 1982 dollars, saved the franchise, and set the standard every Star Trek movie since has been measured against.
Meyer also revealed the project had already churned through script after script, and a fifth draft was on the way when he got involved.
Meyer Didn’t Even Like Star Trek
Here is the part today’s Hollywood should tattoo on its forehead: the man who made the best Star Trek movie wasn’t a fan.
Meyer admitted he had seen the show on TV and it did nothing for him. He thought the costumes looked silly, and he confessed that the element the franchise is celebrated for — people of different races, genders, and cultures coming together to do something good — went right past him.
What changed everything was an epiphany. At 13, Meyer had devoured the Horatio Hornblower novels about a Royal Navy captain adventuring through the Napoleonic Wars, a captain who, Meyer joked, had a girl in every port, which sounded pretty good to a 13-year-old.
He realized Kirk was that same archetype transplanted into space, and once he saw it, he knew exactly how to make the movie.
Notice what is not in that formula: no lectures, no mandates, no message-first filmmaking. Meyer treated Star Trek as a ripping naval adventure with character at the center, and 44 years later fans still hold the result over everything that followed.
Harder For The Salmon To Get Upstream
Asked about today’s landscape, Meyer didn’t sugarcoat it.
He said even film students admit they can’t sit through a full movie anymore, and that entertainment is collapsing into short-form vertical dramas largely financed out of China. He noted Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Quibi had the same idea and was simply a decade or so too early.
Meyer also made a passionate case for the theatrical experience, committing to go somewhere, sitting in the dark with strangers, and sharing something collective yet deeply personal. He warned that we give that up at our peril.
On series storytelling, he compared ongoing shows to the serialized novels of Dickens and Dumas, pointing to Walter White’s slow devolution on Breaking Bad as the format at its best. He even noted that complaints about cliffhangers are nothing new, as they go back to The Odyssey. Homer’s, that is, though Christopher Nolan’s arrives in theaters next week.
But Meyer said the business is now drowning in formulaic mandates on top of competitive and cultural restrictions, making it “harder and harder for the salmon to get upstream.”
Cultural restrictions. His words. And it should sound familiar, because that is exactly the era audiences spent the last decade rejecting. The same era David Ellison’s Paramount has the receipts on as studios do a 180 and court the very fans they shunned.
The Ellison Era Is Already Following Meyer’s Playbook
Now connect the dots.
My Hollywood insiders tell me David Ellison and Mike De Luca are teaming to save Star Trek once the Paramount-WBD deal closes, taking the franchise back to what made Wrath of Khan through Next Generation work.
Discipline over bloat. Character over mandates. Sincerity over lectures. Meyer’s interview reads like the mission statement my sources have been describing for months.
And the pieces keep moving: William Shatner says he would play Kirk again at 95, Paramount is marking the milestone with a massive Original Series 60th anniversary Blu-ray gift set, and the franchise’s big 6-0 lands September 8, with San Diego Comic-Con on deck first.
Meyer saved Star Trek the first time with a quarter of the budget and twice the story. Everything my insiders say about the Ellison era suggests the new regime finally got the message.
