Talking About 'Star Trek': Will Star Trek have any new movies coming out with the original cast and not the new actors?

Will Star Trek have any new movies coming out with the original cast and not the new actors?

Let me get this straight. You’re asking if Paramount will release new films starring the cast from the Original Series and the first six feature films instead of the cast from the Kelvin Timeline movies?

The answer to that is a definitive “No.”

DeForest “Dee” Kelley, who played Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, MD, died in 1999.

James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, died in 2005.

Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, died in 2015

Grace Lee Whitney, who played Yeoman (later Commander) Janice Rand, also died in 2015

The rest of the cast, including William Shatner, has an average age of 80+.

With three of the Enterprise “Big Four” cast members dead and quite a few of the supporting cast members are either dead or no longer active in the acting business, making a new feature film with the Original Series cast is next to impossible.

(What would you call such a film, anyway? Star Trek XIV: The Search for Geritol?

As for the cast from the alternate timeline Star Trek films from 2009–2016:

Don’t count on that happening any time soon.

Paramount was trying to do the fourth film in the Kelvin Timeline, even though the actor who played the “rebooted” Pavel Chekov died before the release of 2016’s Star Trek Beyond. The ending of that movie - which featured an alternative version of the NCC-1701-A’s construction and launch into deep space - pretty much screamed that there was going to be a fourth (and maybe last) Kelvin Timeline film. According to all accounts at the time, the entire main cast, including Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, had signed a contract that guaranteed their appearing in at least one more Star Trek film.

But several things occurred between the signing of the aforementioned contract in the 2000s and 2016.

The first is that both Pine and Chris Hemsworth (who played James T. Kirk’s dad George Kirk in 2009’s Star Trek) climbed up the Hollywood ladder of success in other films. Pine, especially, got plum roles in two other franchises (Jack Ryan and the DCEU films) as CIA analyst Jack Ryan and Steve Trevor. Hemsworth went on to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Thor.

This would not have had a dire effect on Star Trek had Star Trek Beyond been a blockbuster film in Star Trek’s Golden Anniversary Year. But the third Kelvin Timeline movie was not as successful as the studio and its cast had hoped.

And that was a big problem for Paramount because Pine and Hemsworth, who had been tentatively cast as George Kirk in the Star Trek Beyond follow-up, were now “bankable” stars who - naturally - wanted Paramount to give them big paychecks for their talent and screen appeal.

Pine said he’d come back for Star Trek’s fourteenth feature if the studio stuck to the original salary deal. Paramount, pointing to the ledger that showed that Star Trek Beyond had not performed as expected at the box office, said, “No, we can’t afford the original deal.”

So, Pine and Hemsworth walked away.

(I’m not sure about what Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, or John Cho said regarding a fourth film, so I’m just mentioning what I do know about the aborted fourth Kelvin Star Trek film and why that branch of the franchise is dead.)

There isn’t a lot of fan interest in movies with the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, or Star Trek: Enterprise casts. And the new iterations of the franchise have gone back to where Star Trek really belongs: television.