Simon Pegg is opening up about Quentin Tarantino's infamous never-made Star Trek movie and how insane it would have been!
There are numerous "what if” projects in Star Trek history that never came to fruition. From the “Phase II” TV series of the 1970s to Eddie Murphy in Star Trek IV, the “could have been” projects are often more entertaining than what makes it on screen.
Among all these ideas is that in 2017, Quentin Tarantino announced his desire for an R-rated Star Trek movie, which Mark L. Smith wrote. Obviously, the idea of the man behind Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill taking on Star Trek sent the fandom into a frenzy.
Tarantino kept pushing the project for a few years, but by 2024, it was clear it was dead in the water. Speaking to Collider, Simon Pegg, who played Scotty in the later reboot movies and penned the script for Star Trek Beyond, shared his thoughts on the script.
“That was what we call in the business bats—crazy. It was everything you would expect a Quentin Tarantino Star Trek script to be. I think it would have been such an incredible sort of curiosity to see Star Trek through his lens. I don’t know how it would have gone over with the fans, but it certainly would have been an interesting thing.”
Pegg does summarize how the fandom’s reaction to this may have overwhelmed the actual tale.
What was Tarantino’s Star Trek script about?
Reportedly, Tarantino’s script would have been a take on the TOS episode “A Piece of the Action.” This offbeat story has the Enterprise finding a world that had been visited by an early Federation ship that left behind a book on 20th-century crime. Thus, the entire civilization is based on 1930s gangster movies.
The episode is offbeat and funny as Kirk and Spock take on gangster personas to settle this mess. Obviously, the crime saga appealed to Tarantino, who was a longtime Star Trek fan and also hinted there might be time travel involved. He spoke of not liking the Kelvin timeline movies, yet wanted something in the feel of the original series, where episodes wouldn’t use all the characters.
Maybe it’s best this didn’t happen, as Tarantino’s style just didn't fit Star Trek. The series doesn't need to be R-rated or packed with violence while deconstructing the mythos. Star Trek is less about action than messages of peace and understanding, and even having this be a TV show would have been a bit much. Having it be on the original crew seems almost sacrilegious to the fandom, and letting him run with this might well have wrecked the franchise.
Pegg is still hopeful that another movie can be made, just one more in keeping with the feel of Star Trek. Still, one almost wishes Tarantino’s Star Trek script were to get online just to let fans see how insane his take on the franchise would have been.