Paramount has struggled to get Star Trek 4 up and running, so the film has been hanging out in development hell for a while.

Now it looks like they’re ready to bring the film back with the original crew from the rebooted series including Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, John Cho, and Karl Urban, and with Lucy In The Sky director Noah Hawley writing and helming the sequel. More on the report below.

Star Trek 4 found itself in development hell after both Pine and Chris Hemsworth walked away from the project because Paramount was unable to meet their salary demands, with the latter adding that he was unhappy with the script saying “I didn’t feel like we landed on a reason to revisit that yet,” he revealed to Variety earlier this year. “I didn’t want to be underwhelmed by what I was going to bring to the table.”

At the time, S.J. Clarkson was set to direct the film, which would have involved a time-travel plot that would have brought back Hemsworth as George Kirk. Clarkson would have been the first female to direct a film in the Trek franchise. However, after the salary negotiations fallout, the project fell by the wayside.

Deadline was the first to report on the news that Hawley would be writing and directing the fourth installment of the Star Trek reboot. But they did not mention anything about Hemsworth being a part of the cast. This leads us to believe that the studio is ditching the time-traveling story in favor of something else. Or maybe the only way to have a budget for a forth was to move forward with only one Chris instead of two. The reasons probably won’t be revealed to us, but it looks like we are getting another entry in the series nevertheless.

Hawley is best known for writing and creating Fargo and Legion. He has since moved on to films with his directorial debut being Lucy in the Sky starring Natalie Portman. His next film project is a sci-fi flick called Man Alive.

And let’s not forget about that R-rated Star Trek that could be written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. We haven’t heard much about that project since it was announced, but Deadline says that’s still being developed separately with Tarantino working on the project with producer J.J. Abrams, who directed the first two entries of the rebooted film franchise.

We’ll just have to wait and see if Star Trek 4 ever comes to light. It will be interesting to see how the new film moves forward. Will it be the end of that particular franchise, or will it lead to other explorations of deep space? And will Tarantino’s supposed Trek film connect to what Abrams has helped build?

[Source: Deadline]