The movie Noah Hawley will always regret not making: “It was a really hard loss”
With the success of Alien: Earth still fresh in people’s minds, Noah Hawley finds himself in very high demand, a level of acclaim that has been a long time coming for the paralegal-turned-writer.
The creator of the series proved himself highly capable of adapting a popular film property into a TV show, a skill he first demonstrated on Fargo some years earlier, and while there’s no news on what his next plans are, the world will be watching with very keen eyes.
There have been many moments in Hawley’s career that could have led to the big time, but all of them fell through; for instance, he was supposed to write an entry in Universal’s ill-fated Dark Universe series, before that crashed and burned in a spectacular ball of flame. He announced in 2017 that he was working on a movie about Doctor Doom, but Disney’s acquisition of Fox put a stop to that, and then there was the small matter of the ‘final frontier’.
Hawley was revealed to be working on a new entry in the Star Trek movie canon, which would be set in the same universe as JJ Abrams’ Chris Pine-fronted reboot, but would focus on a new crew and a new set of adventures. This looked set to be the writer’s big break, but once again, he was cut off in his prime, and this one hurt.
“It was a really hard loss because we got so close,” he told Men’s Journal, adding, “It was an original story that was not Chris Pine-related, nor was it Captain Kirk-related. I guess the thing that might stick with people is that there was an unboxing of Data, the idea of the android. And that was to become an element in the films.”
Honestly, before I sat down to write this article, I hadn’t thought about those Star Trek films in almost ten years. Lifelong supernerd Abrams first got his hands on the franchise in 2009, taking things back to basics with a story about how a young James Tiberius Kirk, played by Pine, first became captain of the USS Enterprise, in which two more movies followed: Into Darkness, which I remember being pretty solid, and 2016’s Beyond, which I couldn’t tell you a single thing about and there hasn’t been a peep from the series since.
A number of filmmakers entered the race to make Star Trek 4, wherein Quentin Tarantino famously wrote a “batshit crazy” script for the film, while SJ Clarkson was briefly considered to become the first woman to helm the franchise.
Even after Hawley’s version was cancelled, rumours continue to swirl about the movie, and, as it stands, the film is one of the many projects caught up in the Paramount/Skydance merger. There are tentative plans for John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein to make it, but at this point, I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
Even if Star Trek 4 never sees the light of day, Hawley can rest easy knowing that he made it without the help of a series that began in the 1960s, for he made it with the help of a franchise that began in the 1970s instead.
