Simon Pegg Says Quentin Tarantino’s Unmade STAR TREK Movie Was “Batsh*t Crazy”
Simon Pegg has given fans a peek into the Quentin Tarantino Star Trek movie that never got made, and if his description is anything to go by, it would’ve been wild!
Speaking at Fan Expo Boston (via Collider), Pegg revealed that J.J. Abrams and producer Lindsey Weber once shared the breakdown of Tarantino’s pitch with him, and the idea was pure Tarantino energy set in the Star Trek universe.
“That was what we call in the business batshit crazy. It was everything you would expect a Quentin Tarantino Star Trek script to be.”
Pegg admitted he would’ve loved to see the world of Star Trek through the Pulp Fiction director’s lens, even if it might have divided the fanbase.
“I think it would have been such an incredible sort of curio 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.”
Back in late 2017, Paramount and Star Trek producer Abrams accepted Tarantino’s pitch, with Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) brought on board to write the screenplay. But the project stalled.
In 2023, Smith revealed that the biggest obstacle was Tarantino himself, who was wrestling with the idea that Star Trek could be his final film.
“Quentin and I went back and forth, he was gonna do some stuff on it, and then he started worrying about the number, his kind of unofficial number of films.
“I remember we were talking, and he goes, ‘If I can just wrap my head around the idea that Star Trek could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?’ And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk.”
The movie’s setting would have been a retro gangster-inspired world on an Earth-like planet in the 1930s, drawing influence from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “A Piece of the Action” where the Enterprise crew encounters a civilization steeped in 1920s mobster culture.
Sadly, this crazy vision for Star Trek will remain one of Hollywood’s great what-ifs. But somewhere, in Quentin Tarantino’s office, sits the script that might have been.