If you have a Paramount+ subscription, then the TV gates of Star Trek have been opened back up to you since 2017, with shows like Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks and Prodigy (which is now on Netflix) breathing new life into this corner of the franchise. Film-wise though, it’s been eight years since the release of Star Trek Beyond, and development remains stalled on Star Trek 4. Although Simon Pegg, who plays the Kelvin Timeline’s Scotty, is still game to return for this Star Trek sequel, he did acknowledge that it will be “forever tainted” for a specific, yet understandable reason.
On June 19, 2016, a month before the wide release of Star Trek Beyond, Anton Yelchin, who played Pavel Chekov in these movies, tragically died at the age of 27. So regardless of whether Chekov is recast or it’s decided to retire the character, Pegg explained to Katee Sackhoff on The Sackhoff Show that it’ll be sad for him and the other leading actors to tackle Star Trek 4 without their late co-star, though that wouldn’t stop Pegg from agreeing to come back. As he explained:
I’d love to do more. Obviously it’s been forever tainted because we lost Anton, and that was a really hard thing for everyone involved, and for the real world, let alone anything else. If we do come back, if there is another opportunity to come back, then I’d love to. Because as we were saying earlier on, it’s a group of guys that I dearly, dearly love and don’t get to see very often. It would be good to get back together with them.
Simon Pegg’s history with Anton Yelchin stretched back to November 2007, when the first Star Trek movie in this film series began shooting. Naturally when making a movie starting different versions of the crew of the USS Enterprise, Chekov needed to be included, and Yelchin was cast in the role after impressing in movies like Along Came a Spider and Charlie Bartlett. So a certain degree of sadness would be unavoidable when coming back for Star Trek 4, but nevertheless, Pegg would welcome the opportunity to reunite with Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldaña and John Cho.
Even a nearly a decade after Star Trek Beyond, it remains up in the air if Star Trek 4 will ever happen. On the one hand, it was reported in March that The Flight Attendant’s Steve Yockey was writing the script for what’s expected to be the final installment of this saga. On the other hand, Chris Pine was caught off guard by this news in May, and he still doesn’t know where things stand on the project.
Additionally, it was officially confirmed in May that the vaguely-described Star Trek origins movie, which was first reported on in January, would be moving forward. Andor’s Toby Haynes and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’s Seth Grahame-Smith are respectively directing and writing the feature, which will take places decades before the events of 2009’s Star Trek. In other words, the Kelvin timeline is intended to stick around, but we’ll be going backwards within it next rather than forwards. That in turn begs the question of if this means Star Trek 4 is now off the table or if it’s just been pushed back again.
Hopefully Paramount Pictures will provide some kind of official update on Star Trek 4 in the coming months. For now, there are a handful of upcoming Star Trek shows to look forward to, and Simon Pegg can be seen playing Hugh Campbell Sr. in The Boys, which is streamable with an Amazon Prime Video subscription.
