Tarantino’s STAR TREK Would Officially Be His Tenth Movie
The spectre of a Quentin Tarantino-directed Star Trek movie continues to hover in the air. Tarantino has famously and repeatedly stated he will make just ten movies then quit, and with this month's Once Upon A Time In Hollywood representing his ninth, the question of what his next project will be is on everyone's lips.
Many, including us, have questioned whether Star Trek would even count towards Tarantino's much-vaunted "ten movies then I'm out" directing plan, given it'd be a franchise film and not one of his originals. But speaking on the ReelBlend podcast, Tarantino says it absolutely would. "The idea of doing ten isn’t to come up with a loophole," he says; "f I was gonna do Star Trek, I should commit to it. It’s my last movie."
The director raises an interesting idea after that, idly speculating on the notion of his filmography as a look at different careers he might have had:
"There also is another thought process going on, where it’s like [...] maybe that could show a different career I could have had. I’m not saying this is the case, but maybe [Hollywood] is my last original, and Star Trek - or any other thing, a book, or something like that - this is a career I could have had if I wasn’t just writing everything all the time. Maybe I would’ve had a different career if I’d looked for other people’s scripts, or if I wanted to find a book to be inspired by and do an adaptation. That would’ve been a different career, and maybe that would be fun to explore on the tenth. I don’t know. I’m making this all up as I go along, but those are two different ways I could look at it."
Given that Tarantino has already done a book adaptation, it sounds like he is, as he often does, talking out of his ass just a little, but that's an interesting concept. Doing a Star Trek movie as his final cinematic contribution to the world would be a magnificent left-turn and a bizarre exclamation point on a career built on originality. I don't know. I'm into it.
Regardless of whether or not Tarantino ends up making his Star Trek movie (and we're leaning towards it probably not happening), our hope is that we eventually get to find out what that movie would have looked like. Given that Tarantino's plan post-tenth-movie is to work on projects like books, stageplays, and the like, it's not inconceivable that, were it not to be made, the screenplay for that film might get released somehow. That'd require Paramount to get on board with the idea, of course, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. We just want to know what his big idea for the franchise was.
There's also the fact to consider that Tarantino is a human being and is thus open to changing his mind whenever he goddamn wants to. Maybe he won't stop directing. Maybe he'll come back and make something else if he makes it to a hundred years old. The future is unwritten. What would you like to see from him?
