THE RINGS OF POWER Showrunners Shares Details on Their Scrapped STAR TREK 4 Project
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power showrunners, JD Payne and Patrick McKay got their start as writers on the 2016 movie Star Trek Beyond. The pair had plans to write a fourth Star Trek movie that unfortunately got scrapped, but they sat down with Esquire to explain to fans what it would have been about.
McKay began the conversation, explaining:
“I would love to tell you about it. We worked on a couple of Star Trek movies. The one you’re asking about would have been the fourth in the franchise, reuniting Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pine. The conceit was that through a cosmic quirk in the Star Trek world, they were the same age. It was going to be a grand father-son space adventure—think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in space. We were really thrilled about it. We had an original villain and a really cool 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque sci-fi idea at the core. We worked on it for two and half years with Lindsey Weber, our non-writing executive producer on Rings of Power, and an amazing director, S.J. Clarkson. The movie eventually fell apart and it really was a heartbreak for us. It’s part of what led us here, because it got us thinking, ‘Gosh, with a big IP title, big movie stars, and a story that we all felt had the chance to be terrific, it couldn't come together.’ We felt the winds were shifting against big movies, which is part of what made us start taking TV seriously. That led us to Rings of Power. But we would have loved to make that movie. I want to spoil a piece of it that's exciting—how they end up together. Can we do that, JD?”
Payne responded, saying:
“Sure, why not? There’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called ‘Relics’ where they find Scotty, who's been trapped a transporter for a couple of decades, and they're able to have cool adventure with him. Our conceit was, ‘What if right before the Kelvin impacted with that huge mining ship, George Kirk had tried to beam himself over to his wife's shuttle where his son, Jim Kirk, had just been born? And what if the ship hadn’t completely exploded—what if it left some space junk?’ Think about when you send a text message and you’ve typed it out, but you haven't quite hit send. On the other side, they see those three little dots that someone has typed. It’s like the transporter had absorbed his pattern up into the pattern buffer, but hadn’t spit him out on the other side. It was actually a saved copy of him that was in the computer.”
McKay added:
“So the adventure is that Chris Pine and the crew of the Enterprise have to seek out the wreckage of the ship that his father died on because of a mystery and a new villain. In the ship, they stumble across his father's pattern. They beam him out and he has no idea that no time has passed at all, and that he's looking at his son. Then the adventure goes from there.”
It sounds like this Star Trek movie would have been pretty awesome. It’s too bad it wasn’t able to come together, but maybe it will happen in the future? Maybe not, but never say never.