Noah Hawley Renews Hope For His Canceled Trek Film
Could this still happen?
Since 2016, the saga of various unmade Star Trek films has been a long and strange journey. Currently, it seems that the writer-directors of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves — Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley — have the best chance of actually getting a new Trek feature film made. But one of the most interesting unmade Trek films of the past nine years is a concept developed by Noah Hawley, which came very, very close to getting a green light. And now, according to a snippet from a new interview with Hawley, the powers-that-be at Paramount might still be interested in him doing something. Maybe.
“I mean, I talked to David Ellison recently. And I was like, ‘You still haven’t made a ‘Star Trek’ movie,” Hawley revealed on the SmartLess podcast recently. “I’m just saying it’s in there. I love it.”
Noah Hawley discussing Alien: Earth.
Ellison, the new head of Paramount, has made it clear in the past few months that a sequel to the Chris Pine-led reboot films will not be the future of Trek on the big screen. This means, in theory, the “Kelvin Timeline,” which created a new, parallel Trek in 2009, will not be explored going forward in the next film, at least not in a straightforward “Star Trek 4” project; a hypothetical direct sequel to 2016’s Star Trek Beyond.
Could Hawley’s take still find a place in the new, unfolding power structure at Paramount? As his hit FX series Alien: Earth was released this summer, Hawley also revealed in a few interviews exactly what his unmade film would have dealt with: androids. “I guess the thing that might stick with people is that there was an unboxing of Data, the idea of the android,” he said in September. “And that was to become an element in the films.”
Obviously, the story of Star Trek: Picard Season 1 was heavily focused on androids, and since 2023, we’ve seen two resurrections of Brent Spiner’s Mr. Data. More recently, Hawley’s Alien: Earth unboxed a different type of artificial lifeform. Well, actually three different types: Hybrids, Cyborgs, and good-old-fashioned Alien Synths make up the primary story of Alien: Earth, so much so, one has to wonder if Hawley didn’t repurpose some of his Star Trek ideas for Alien: Earth.
There’s no indication that Hawley’s abandoned Trek film will get another shot at Paramount. But with new leadership, you never know. Five years ago, the movie was shut down partly because, according to Hawley in the same new interview, Paramount was worried about doing a Kelvin movie before doing something new. “They said, ‘Well, how do we know people are going to like it? Shouldn’t we do a transition movie from Chris Pine, play it safe?’ And so it kind of went away.”
Hawley has certainly proven he has the touch when it comes to unique and dramatic takes on established franchises. Whether or not he ever gets to do a Star Trek film is clearly, at this point, his final frontier.
