UPDATE 9/10: Paramount is running the same play on another CBS property: a Hawaii Five-O movie with Spider-Man director Destin Daniel Cretton.
UPDATE 9/8: Star Trek turns 60 today, and everything still rides on this movie — here is where the franchise stands.
As Cosmic Book News exclusively reported back on June 29, David Ellison and Mike De Luca are out to save Star Trek, and on July 2 our Hollywood insiders spelled out the plan: take the franchise back to what made The Wrath of Khan through The Next Generation work.
Now the two filmmakers writing and directing the new Star Trek movie have described that exact film on the record.
Speaking with Inverse while promoting their Ryan Reynolds-Kenneth Branagh action comedy Mayday, out September 4 on Apple TV, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein reveal their untitled Star Trek film is a tense, near-real-time thriller about the institution of Starfleet itself — with Training Day and Crimson Tide as the models.
‘Training Day’ And ‘Crimson Tide’ In Starfleet
“Two movies we cite as comps for what we’re hoping to do are Training Day and Crimson Tide,” Goldstein tells Inverse.
Comps (or comparisons) are the reference points filmmakers use to describe the kind of movie they’re making, and these two say a lot.
Daley describes the script as a look at what a long lifespan does to any institution, Starfleet included.
Star Trek has always shown Starfleet as an idealized version of the future, and while Daley says this is not a cynical or nihilistic take, he acknowledges “there are some bad apples in every institution” whose voices can shape what that institution stands for.
“It takes place almost in real time,” Daley adds, calling it a whole other look at what a Star Trek movie can be “without betraying the fundamentals of what it should be.”
The pair also confirmed the film features all-new Star Trek characters, matching what they told Hall H at Comic-Con in July: no returning crews, set further into the future than anything we’ve seen.
Worth noting: the movie is in development, not production. That means the script is still being written and cameras aren’t rolling, so there’s no start date or release date yet.
The Wrath Of Khan DNA
Look at the two comps.
Training Day is Antoine Fuqua’s crooked-cop classic — corruption inside a storied institution, one bad apple with a badge.
Crimson Tide is Tony Scott’s 1995 submarine thriller, Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman locked in a real-time standoff over nuclear launch orders, in a movie that famously drops more than one original Star Trek reference.
Both are Denzel movies, by the way.
And Crimson Tide‘s DNA runs straight back to The Wrath of Khan, where Nicholas Meyer staged Kirk vs. Khan as naval warfare in space: two captains hunting each other blind, one wrong move from disaster.
History matters here. The Wrath of Khan is the movie that saved Star Trek in 1982, made for about $11.2 million after the bloated Motion Picture, with Kirk treated as Horatio Hornblower in space, character at the center, and no lectures. Meyer walked through exactly how he pulled it off, and it reads like the Ellison-era mission statement.
The situation now is the one Meyer walked into. The TV side hasn’t been any good: Discovery is over, Starfleet Academy was killed after never charting in a Nielsen weekly top ten, Strange New Worlds ends with Season 5, both wrap in 2027, and there is nothing behind them.
That side is getting reset too: Paramount+ is canvassing “a lot of writers” for the next era, with Alex Kurtzman going unmentioned as his deal runs out.
In 1982 a movie saved Star Trek from itself. Ellison’s Paramount is lining up to do it the same way.
Serious, grounded, character-driven, built for the big screen. That is the exact approach our insiders said Ellison’s regime is returning to.
Goldstein also made clear they aren’t making this one for the faithful alone.
The goal is a great movie that stands on its own for newcomers, and “with good fortune, we launch a new franchise into existence.”
Daley adds that with TV this cinematic, a theatrical Star Trek has to justify the biggest screen possible, so spectacle is a requirement.
Audiences never rejected these franchises. They rejected bad versions of them, and this pitch sounds like the fix.
Same Insiders, Same Track Record
The receipts on this one are dated.
June 29: Ellison and De Luca team to save Star Trek.
July 2: the reboot goes back to the Wrath of Khan-to-Next Generation roots.
August 13: the same sources said Paramount-WBD is putting director’s cuts back in theaters, Star Trek included — confirmed when AMC listed the Star Trek 60th Anniversary Event, which puts The Wrath of Khan Director’s Cut back on the big screen September 4-8.
So the same week the new movie’s directors compare their film to Crimson Tide, Paramount is putting the actual Wrath of Khan back in theaters.
The reset is happening out in the open.
The stakes are just as clear: as we recently covered, a well-placed industry source warns everything rides on this movie, with no backup plan behind it.
The reset isn’t a rumor anymore. The guys making the movie just described it on the record.
