STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS Almost Wrapped Up With a Movie Instead of Season 5
When Star Trek: Strange New Worlds launched, fans didn’t know how long Captain Pike and the crew of the Enterprise would be exploring the galaxy. We now know the adventure will officially end with a fifth and final season, but that wasn’t always the plan. In fact, the show almost wrapped things up a whole year earlier… with a movie.
Speaking at the Star Trek Las Vegas convention, Rebecca Romijn, who plays Una Chin-Riley (Number One), revealed that the original plan was for Strange New Worlds to end after the currently in-production fourth season with a feature-length film.
Romijn explained, “Initially, it was going to end after season four, and then a movie. But Henry Alonso Meyers and Akiva Goldsman went in and fought for a season five.” Thanks to that push, fans will now get six more episodes before the series calls it quits.
That’s a bittersweet win. Sure, a movie could have been epic, but it would’ve been just two hours of new Star Trek instead of a full season’s worth of adventures.
Still, the shorter run for Season 5 reflects the shifting state of the franchise. Over the past few years, Paramount has tightened its Trek slate after a period of rapid streaming growth. With the company’s $8 billion sale to Skydance now complete, Strange New Worlds is on its way out, and only Starfleet Academy remains in active production for at least two seasons.
What happens after that? It’s unclear. There are film projects floating in the ether as Patrick Stewart has teased a Picard-era movie, the long-hoped-for fourth “Kelvin Timeline” film is still hanging around, and Toby Haynes is developing a Starfleet “origins” film set shortly after First Contact.
Most fans will tell you that Star Trek thrives best in long-form storytelling. While the big screen has given us some legendary moments, there’s just something about spending hours upon hours with these characters that can’t be replaced.
A film finale might have been a fun experiment, but now we get one last season to boldly go with this crew before they take their final bow.