Zachary Quinto spoke with The Talk recently about reprising his role as Spock in a fourth Star Trek film and while interested, he remains unsure it’ll happen.
Zachary Quinto rose to fame for two main roles, Sylar on the NBA series Heroes and as the first person to play the role of Spock after Leonard Nimoy. He debuted in the role in the 2009 reboot called Star Trek and reprised the role twice after in both Into Darkness and Beyond. Since Beyond debuted in 2016, the talk has been about when the fourth film in the now-named Kelvin Timeline will happen.
Despite constant attempts to get a fourth film going, including three different films currently being kicked around Paramount right now, nothing has come of it. That brings us to last week when Quinto did an interview with The Talk where he talked about wanting to reprise the role but also talked about how the over-saturation of the televised Star Trek may be hindering the fourth film.
"We talk about it all the time as the crew of the Enterprise, we’re all incredibly close friends in real life and I think all of us would welcome the opportunity to go back and keep telling those stories. Seems like a bit of a saturated market at this point, so I’m not sure what the plans are for the feature film version of the franchise, but we’re all here if they want to beam us up."
Quinto may have a point. There are currently six television series in the works, or currently airing right now for various ViacomCBS platforms. There’s the three live-action, long-form television series in Discovery, Picard, and the soon-to-be-in-production Strange New Worlds. Then there’s the short-form series in Short Treks, and not too mention the two animated series in Lower Decks and the in-development Prodigy; which will air on Nickelodeon.
There’s also talks still of a Section 31 series.
With a potential seven series all airing in the same year, Quinto’s observation of an over-saturated Star Trek market may hold water. That doesn’t mean the numerous TV shows are a bad thing, necessarily but it does make it harder to justify spending over $100 million on another movie. Especially when series like Discovery and Picard could meet that number for a given season.