Noah Hawley Said Paramount Loved His Original ‘Star Trek’ Idea Before New Execs Cancelled The Project

Award-winning American filmmaker and author Noah Hawley was hired to write and direct a new Star Trek film, following the release of Star Trek Beyond almost a decade ago, but it was shelved after a change in Paramount’s leadership. The film would have been separate from the Chris Pine-led Kelvin Timeline films and would have featured an all-new original crew, with a plot that included attempts to connect elements of the Star Trek The Next Generation television series.

Hawley is best known for creating and showrunning the acclaimed FX television series Fargo and Legion, and his latest series, Alien: Earth, which premiered on FX in August 2025 and has been renewed for a second season.

Several different incarnations of Star Trek films were said to have been announced or to be in development at one point, but Paramount has persistently denied any production comments or progress on any of those projects. There’s recently been an announcement for a new Trek film, which I will dive into later. First, let’s investigate the Hawley-led film that never was and the secrets surrounding its cancellation.

Hawley’s new Star Trek adventure, set for release sometime after 2020, was going to star actors Cate Blanchett and Rami Malek, with a story that focused on creative problem-solving dealing with a “virus that wipes out vast parts of the known universe.” Although the film never materialized, the filmmaker and author went in-depth while speaking with Variety recently about his film and how it would have had strong connections to the franchise, even if it didn’t feature the characters people know and love, and that it was not going to feature Captain Kirk or Picard. He stated that it was “a start from scratch that then allows us to do what we did with ‘Fargo,’ where for the first three hours you go, ‘Oh, it really has nothing to do with the movie,’ and then you find the money. So you reward the audience with a thing that they love.”

On a new episode of the SmartLess podcast, the writer/director walked through what happened to the ‘Trek’ movie he almost made and revealed just how far the project had progressed before it was shut down:

“So I went in, I talked to Paramount, I sold them this original idea. It wasn’t Chris Pine; it wasn’t anything. I wrote it, and they said, ‘We love it, let’s prep it.’ We were, you know, we were… I was going to move to Australia, we were booking stages, whatever,” he said.

Prepping for the film began actively casting, with initial conceptual work and planning taking place. The project appeared to be “on track” for production in 2020 until the change in leadership at Paramount Pictures halted the project to take the franchise in a different, safer direction, favoring a return to the established Kelvin timeline cast over Hawley’s original concept, a concept that has never materialized to this day.

“And then, you know, as happens in Hollywood, Jim Gianopulos, who was running the studio at the time, he’s like, ‘I’m going to bring in somebody else under me, and they’re going to take over the film studio.’”

And the first thing they did was kill the original ‘Star Trek’ movie because they said, ‘Well, how do we know people are going to like it?’ Like, you know, ‘Shouldn’t we do a transition movie from Chris Pine[’s cast], play it safe, you know, whatever?’ And so it kind of went away.”

The good thing is that Hawley’s desire to do Star Trek movie isn’t entirely gone: “I mean, I talked to David Ellison recently. And I was like, ‘You still haven’t made a ‘Star Trek’ movie. I’m just saying it’s in there. I love it.’”

Unfortunately, fans of Hawley may never get to see his vision for Star Trek on the big screen because Paramount has recently announced a new Star Trek film, which coincidentally will be a completely original take on the franchise, unrelated to any previous movies or TV shows, being written, produced, and directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, known for their work on Spider-Man: Homecoming and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Even though this newly helmed project is greenlighted you just never know with Paramount. There kinda like Disney and Lucasfilm in the way they handle projects and announcements. It’s all over the map and you just never know what you’re gonna get in the end.

But, you can never say never although there just aren’t many well-documented examples of a film being completely scrapped and then remade by the same studio with the same director, other than the case of Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, that came 19 years later. That’s just how Hollywood works, my friends; it’s a sometimes cutthroat business that can make or shatter dreams.

”Live long and prosper.”