Star Trek Just Inched Closer to Its Biggest Movie Mistake Yet

As much as we love them, the Star Trek movies have their share of mistakes. God stealing a starship, John Harrison revealing himself as Khan, McCoy shaving off his beard in The Motion Picture. But it looks like the movie franchise is about to outdo them all.

Paramount has officially added the next Star Trek movie to its 2025 release schedule. According to TrekCore, the project currently called Untitled Star Trek Origin Story will begin production this year, with Seth Grahame-Smith writing and Toby Haynes directing. The film will take place decades before the 2009 Star Trek reboot from J.J. Abrams.

And it’s a terrible idea.

First of all, there’s the question of the timeline logistics of the film. Although one would assume that the film will occur in the Kelvin Timeline, the alternate universe in which Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness, and Star Trek Beyond take place, the Kelvin timeline branched from the Prime Timeline when the Romulan Nero went back in time and destroyed the USS Kelvin, killing George Kirk and setting James T. Kirk’s Enterprise adventures on an alternate course.

Because Nero destroys the Kelvin on the day of Kirk’s birth, that means that there was no Kelvin timeline a few decades before most of the events of the 2009 movie. So what the heck is the origin story going to be about? Is it about the origin of the Federation? We already saw that on Enterprise, which takes place a century before The Original Series. Is it about the Enterprise before Kirk? We got that in the first two seasons of Discovery and in Strange New Worlds.

To be sure, these entries didn’t completely mine all the possible stories of the era, but that generation has received so much attention already. Between movies, TV shows, and all of the non-canon novels and comics, fans have seen plenty of looks at the early days of Starfleet, the Federation, and especially the USS Enterprise.

That’s even true of some of the best current Star Trek series. While Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks have a lot of fun putting new twists on familiar ideas, they offer little new to the larger tapestry of Star Trek stories. Contrast those in-jokes to learning about Janeway looking for her one-time Voyager shipmate Chakotay on Prodigy, or seeing a mature Seven of Nine take the Captain’s chair at the end of Picard. Look how much better Discovery became after launching into the undiscovered country of the 32nd century instead of filling gaps (or making new gaps) in the TOS era.

These constant returns to the past violate the basic premise of Star Trek. Sure, some of the best Trek entries involve trips to the past. But the core mission of the franchise is about moving forward, boldly going into a future we can only imagine in the present. Viewers don’t want to see a past that’s already been explored so thoroughly over the last few decades. We want to see how this universe has progressed, how the actions of Kirk, Picard, and the other Captains have affected the universe in ways good and bad.

In short, a Star Trek origin movie is wrong headed, mining nostalgia and references instead of seeking out new life and civilizations.