The Star Trek franchise has been going for 50 years. However, in that time the basic structure of the stories they've told has remained the same. One person thinks it's time for that to change. Doug Jung, who co-write Star Trek Beyond with Simon Pegg, believes that with all the history and lore that the franchise has built, there's plenty more that Star Trek could do with their own cinematic universe.
It's a franchise that can support different styles of movies. There's the big action tentpole feel of Star Trek and the Enterprise, but why not try to do something that's the Zero Dark Thirty version of Star Trek, or one that introduces some younger characters at the Academy? It's 50 years' worth of discovery, and obviously they're doing that with Star Trek Discovery, but why not blow it out to a cinematic universe that has secondary characters, and smaller storylines, more intimate storylines, ones that deal with more of an espionage element versus the large-scale exploration themes of the main Star Trek.
Clearly, with multiple TV series that spawned multiple movies, there's a pretty big universe out there already, but for the most part, the number of different stories told has been minimal. The majority of the series have all focused on space exploration, and the different things encountered during that exploring. The films have only focused on a handful of characters. What Doug Jung is talking about with Entertainment Weekly is expanding the sort of stories that Star Trek tells in the way that Star Wars is doing with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
This sounds like a fantastic idea. Paramount could absolutely turn writers loose on different Star Trek ideas. There have to be lots of different people with different ideas that could take place within the larger Star Trek universe. They don't even need to focus on the Federation. There are countless alien races that could have a story to tell. As Doug Jung says, Starfleet Academy must have lots of characters that could be the focus of a film. The different series have covered hundreds of years of time and surely other things worth making movies about have happened in that period beyond the events that we've seen on the big and small screen. Heck, now with Star Trek they have at least two complete timelines to play with, meaning they could go off into even more directions.
Of course, as far as that goes any cinematic universe would need to be careful. Audiences would have the potential to get seriously confused if people were making movies within two different time lines one right after the other. It's probably best that the cinematic universe focus on one, television can have the other.
What types of new and different Star Trek movies would you like to see? Give us your Star Trek cinematic universe ideas in the comments below.
