Star Trek hasn’t been in a movie theater since 2016. That’s ten years of streaming spinoffs, canceled shows and sagging viewership, and now Paramount is betting the whole franchise’s momentum on a film with characters nobody has met yet.
The risk here isn’t subtle. Every Star Trek film ever made has been spun off from one of the television series. This one won’t be.
A new era, and nobody knows whose faces are in it
Late in 2025, Deadline reported that a new Star Trek feature had entered development, with John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the pair behind Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, attached as writers. The project was described as the beginning of a new era. Which raised roughly a thousand questions and answered none of them.
The two got a little more specific at San Diego Comic-Con in 2025. “I think we’ve said in the past…it won’t be the characters that you’ve seen previously in your Star Trek movies. So there will be a new take on that. And I think it’ll probably be a little further into the future than we’ve been before…. what draws us to it is the opportunity to do a different spin,” Goldstein said.
Further into the future than we’ve been before means past 3195, the setting of Starfleet Academy. That’s genuinely uncharted territory for a franchise that has mapped almost everything else.
The math on why this one matters more
Viewership for recent Trek is down. The latest season of Strange New Worlds pulled a lower Rotten Tomatoes score. Starfleet Academy was canceled quickly earlier this year after failing to connect with most audiences.
And beyond the final seasons of Starfleet Academy and Strange New Worlds, there are no confirmed shows. None. The television arm of a television franchise is, for the moment, going dark.
So the movie stops being a fun side project and becomes the whole plan. If it lands, expect more stories in that new setting. If it doesn’t, there may be no more Star Trek for a while.
Trek works best when it’s doing both jobs at once
Yes, this is primarily a TV franchise. But some of its most memorable moments came from big-budget films. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, released in 1982, still sits among the best science fiction movies of the last 100 years.
The 1980s and 90s figured out the balance. The Next Generation ran on television while theatrical films like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country hit cinemas. Two engines, same ship.
Marvel’s Disney+ era shows how ugly that balance gets when you fumble it. Trek didn’t fumble it then. It has to not fumble it now, with fewer pieces on the board.
JJ Abrams proved the other half of the argument in 2009, when he rebooted the original characters into a new timeline for the big screen. That film, following the path of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek: First Contact, showed how wide the brand’s appeal could get when the budget matched the premise.
The worst case isn’t actually the end
Let’s be honest about the doomsday framing. Star Trek is an enormously well-known property, and Paramount will keep gambling on it in other ways even if this film underperforms.
Quentin Tarantino wanted to make one for years. It never happened, but that’s the point: there’s always a filmmaker with a pitch.
A fourth Kelvin timeline movie remains possible, Tarantino or not. Consider that ten years passed between the last episode of the original series and 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and the cast kept coming back after that. Leonard Nimoy’s Spock turned up in the 2009 film.
A Captain Kirk spinoff to Strange New Worlds has been discussed as a series. Given the pivot from streaming toward theatrical, a Paul Wesley-led reboot of the original crew arriving as a movie instead isn’t hard to imagine.
There’s room in the Kelvin timeline for other stories too. A recast Next Generation in the mold of the 2009 film would keep the connective tissue intact while pushing forward.
Thirteen shows in, and the safest move is the unfamiliar one
The franchise has produced 13 shows counting the animated series and Short Treks, and it grew from one crew in 1966 into something much larger the moment The Next Generation premiered in 1987. That expansion worked because it dared to leave familiar faces behind.
Daley and Goldstein are being asked to do that again, on a bigger budget, with the franchise’s near-term future riding on it.
Strange New Worlds is airing its fourth season right now. Watch it knowing that when it ends, the next Star Trek anyone sees will be strangers on a bridge, somewhere past 3195, with everything on the line.
