UPDATE 2: Shatner has responded with a statement: a meaningful Kirk pitch “has never come up.”
UPDATE: Shatner headlines the Star Trek panel at New York Comic-Con on October 10.
William Shatner turned down Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
Executive producer Henry Alonso Myers tells TrekMovie the show went after Shatner every single season, and the pitch that came closest was an animated follow-up to “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the 1967 episode often called the best in franchise history.
It never happened, and now the clock has run out. Strange New Worlds ends with its upcoming fifth and final season.
The Alex Kurtzman era of Star Trek ends with it, and Cosmic Book News insiders say the new regime is taking the franchise back to what works, in the tone of The Wrath of Khan and The Next Generation.
If Shatner is going to return as Kirk, it will be there.
An Animated “City on the Edge of Forever” Part Two
Early last year, Shatner teased that he was “awaiting a pitch” from a Star Trek writer who had impressed him.
Myers confirms that pitch came from Strange New Worlds, and that landing Shatner has been a goal for him and co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman from the start.
“It’s been his great gift to try to get Shatner on the show, and we have tried every season. We came very close that season. We had a wonderful discussion with him. We were trying to make something that was something he could be a part of, that’s something we could actually show on screen.”
Myers continued:
“What we were trying to do was an animated episode with him. We wanted to do like a very serious one. We had a whole plan to do it around him and to redo ‘City on the Edge of Forever’ and kind of do a retelling, not a retelling, like a part two kind of thing.”
The animation would have followed the style of the 1970s Star Trek: The Animated Series, letting the 95-year-old Shatner voice a younger Kirk.
In the original episode, Kirk travels back to Depression-era New York, falls in love with Edith Keeler (Joan Collins), and has to let her die to save the future.
So why didn’t the sequel happen? Per Myers, the two sides never got on the same page.
“Sometimes these things work out, sometimes they don’t. We wanted to find something that would have pulled him in and made him interested. Sometimes it’s hard to find something on the same page as the people you want to work with.”
Shatner has not played Kirk on screen since 1994’s Star Trek: Generations. The Season 4 finale, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” streams September 24 with Paul Wesley as the young Kirk.
The Kurtzman Era Is Over
Strange New Worlds is the last show standing from the Kurtzman era.
Starfleet Academy has been canceled. Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, and Prodigy are already done.
Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout deal with Paramount expires at the end of the year. As we reported earlier today, insiders say he won’t continue, with Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy set to help steer Star Trek alongside David Ellison.
Paramount+ has already been canvassing writers as that deal runs out.
The receipts go back months. On June 29, our insiders said Ellison and De Luca are teaming up to save Star Trek. On July 2, the same sources said the franchise is going back to its Wrath of Khan-to-Next Generation roots.
The timeline is now set, as Paramount settled with California on September 21 and the $111 billion Warner Bros. merger closes by early October.
“It Has To Be The Show”
Shatner laid out his condition for a return in early 2025.
“I have been asked to come back as Kirk so many times. If Kirk is going to come back, it has to mean something. It has to be the show.”
Shatner, 95, has already said he would play Kirk at this age. The interest is there. The vehicle wasn’t.
An animated one-off on a series that is ending was never going to be “the show.”
A Star Trek rebuilt around The Wrath of Khan and The Next Generation could be.
Shatner turned down the last pitch of the old era. If Kirk is coming back, it happens under the new one.
