Noah Hawley calls cancellation of his ST film a wound

Noah Hawley disappointed in cancellation of his Star Trek script

In 2019, Variety reported that Noah Hawley, the creator of the television series, Fargo, was set to write the script for the fourth Star Trek film. He was also tapped to direct the movie as well. Hawley completed the script in September 2020, but the project went into stasis. It was officially cancelled in November 2020 when Emma Watts, the new president of Paramount Pictures decided to go in a different direction.

Hawley spoke to Deadline this month about the demise of his project and said that it was a really fun movie, and he believed it would have been a great film. Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard composer Jeff Russo agreed, saying, after he read the script, that “fans were going to lose their mind.”  But the greatness of the script didn’t stop Emma Watts from axing the project, but Hawley said he was surprised that he had gotten as far as he had under Wyck Godfrey and Jim Gianopulos.

Noah Hawley said the cancellation wasn’t easy

Hawley doesn’t call the loss of his movie life or death, but he admits it wasn’t easy to learn it wasn’t going forward.

"“Yeah, It’s not easy. You have to allow yourself to have that process of – I won’t say grieving because you know, it’s not life or death – but you know you do have to pour your forty out on the ground for the movie that would have been. To really celebrate that you were excited artistically about something, and now you have to – just as you were getting ready to ramp up – you have to cauterize that wound and move on.”"

The fourth installment is set to release on June 9, 2023, but there is little information about it other than it will be written by  Kalinda Vazquez, who has also written for Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Short Treks. We still don’t know if the newest movie will include the cast from the first three J.J. Abrams’ movies, although, Zachary Quinto told CinemaBlend back in April that if everyone was available, he was sure they’d be happy to join the movie. But Vazquez may decide to start from scratch, much like Noah Hawley was going to do.

Many of us Trekkies are disappointed that we won’t see what Hawley had in mind for Star Trek, but there is always the possibility that maybe, one day down the road, his script will be brought to the big screen. Anything is possible in this universe.