Screenwriter says Quentin Tarantino scrapped ‘Star Trek’ as he didn’t want it to be final movie
According to screenwriter Mark L. Smith, Quentin Tarantino shelved his Star Trek movie as he didn’t want it to be his final effort before retirement.
The Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill director is working on his alleged final effort, The Movie Critic. The auteur has previously discussed the inspiration for his upcoming film, which is set in late 1970s California, and based on “a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.”
As a lifelong fan of the Star Trek franchise, in the past, he teased making an adult-oriented edition of it. It was revealed he was going to set his film on the gangster planet that featured in the classic episode ‘A Piece Of The Action’ and described it as “Pulp Fiction in space.”
In a new interview with Collider, Mark L. Smith, who worked on the script for Tarantino’s scrapped Star Trek movie, explained why he thinks it never came to fruition. “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,” he said.
Smith continued: “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.”
Adding: “I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those things that I can’t ever see happening. But it would be the greatest Star Trek film, not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was just a balls-out kind of thing.”
The screenwriter compared the script to Taika Waititi’s hit Marvel flick Thor: Ragnarok, which represented a departure from the usual style of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“It was like suddenly it had a different feel for the Marvel stuff,” he clarified. “It was like, ‘That’s fun. That’s different.’ And I guess Guardians [Of The Galaxy] to some level, but it was just like a different vibe and that’s what I thought it could bring to Star Trek was just a different level.”
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