Robert Sallin is a name in Star Trek that is pretty iconic. He helped produce Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which stands as one of the greatest Star Trek films of all time. It brought back series favorite Ricardo Montalban as the insidious Khan Noonien Singh and featured one of the best dialogues in franchise history.
Sallin clearly knew what worked and believes he still knows what works.
So when he sat down to do an interview with We Got This Covered, Salling wanted to pitch his script to Paramount and see how they liked it. It was considered to be something Star Trek had never done before but as a concept, would only work for a movie or two. He got to pitch his idea to Paramount, but if rumors are to be believed, they passed on it to go with Quentin Tarantino.
Here’s what Sallin said courtesy of We Got This Covered;
"So I said to them, look, if I was sitting in the top seat I would just pull back, but in the interim, you have to recognize that the fans are hungry, the fans really want another Star Trek film or films, and I had developed a concept, and I had roughed it out. I had the whole structure, and I even had some specific scenes that I’d written myself, and I didn’t want to divulge any of that to them until I knew that they were receptive, but my concept is one that has never been done in Star Trek and I know from my heart of hearts, and I know from my own experience, that the fans would find this intriguing and rewarding and satisfying."
That is something the fans have been hoping for with the recent Star Trek films. It doesn’t matter who you are, or which films you like, one of the three new Star Trek films will end up being a personal favorite and one that you can’t stand. It really just depends on what your tastes are.
To say the films and the opinions surrounding them were subjective is accurate if wholly underwhelming of a description.
To have a film that would’ve made most of, if not the entire fanbase satisfied? That’s an idea worth exploring. Yet, we don’t know the details of his script, so it’s hard to what fans would’ve thought.