“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay revealed that when they were picked to write the follow-up to the 2016 film “Star Trek: Beyond,” they had envisioned a film that would bring back Chris Hemsworth to reprise his role in the 2009 “Trek” reboot as Capt. James Kirk’s supposedly dead father, George.
Payne and McKay have spent the last five years writing scripts with billions of dollars in Amazon money behind them for “The Rings of Power,” but once upon a time, they had been attached to write the long-delayed fourth installment in Paramount’s “Star Trek” reboot film series.
Now, in an interview with Esquire, they have revealed what they had planned.
Through a quirk of Starfleet technology, Kirk’s father, George, would have found himself hurtling forward through time and coming face-to-face with his fully grown son, played by Chris Pine, who, of course, is now the beloved captain of the Enterprise.
“It was going to be a grand father-son space adventure—think ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ in space,” McKay said. “We were really thrilled about it. We had an original villain and a really cool ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’-esque sci-fi idea at the core.”
Payne even went as far as to cite “Trek” history as precedent for how this encounter could happen, referencing an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in which Picard and his crew investigate the wreckage of a Starfleet ship and find that the damaged transporter was in the midst of beaming up a passenger when it blew up, but still had enough power to sustain his life signal.
When the crew beams down the signal, the person that had been stuck in the signal for decades turns out to be none other than original Enterprise chief engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, played once again by James Doohan. Payne says they were planning to use that episode as the basis for their film.
“Our conceit was, ‘What if right before the Kelvin impacted with that huge mining ship, George Kirk had tried to beam himself over to his wife’s shuttle where his son, Jim Kirk, had just been born? And what if the ship hadn’t completely exploded—what if it left some space junk?’” Payne explained. “Think about when you send a text message and you’ve typed it out, but you haven’t quite hit send. On the other side, they see those three little dots that someone has typed. It’s like the transporter had absorbed his pattern up into the pattern buffer, but hadn’t spit him out on the other side.”
Unfortunately, those plans for a “Star Trek” reboot fell apart. While the project was announced in 2018, the script was shelved soon after when contract talks with both Pine and Hemsworth fell through, leaving Payne and McKay to move on to developing “The Rings of Power.”
While Paramount has continued to develop a wide range of “Trek” series for streaming, including the ongoing “Star Trek: Discovery” which is filming its fifth season, “Trek” has been absent from the big screen since “Beyond” came out six years ago. The studio had plans to release a “Trek” film in December 2023, but removed it from the slate after “WandaVision” director Matt Shakman, who had been attached to helm the film, left the project to return to Marvel Studios and direct “Fantastic Four.”