Quentin Tarantino's 'hard R' Star Trek film was going to have "Pulp Fiction violence," says writer

The Star Trek franchise seems to be doing great nowadays with TV shows and video games coming out regularly, but the film side of the business seems kind of cursed (at least that’s what Chris Pine thinks). It’s been more than seven years since Star Trek Beyond was released, yet new theatrical Star Trek projects seem to be stuck in what sometimes feels like development hell.

Perhaps chief among the unmade films is Quentin Tarantino’s ‘hard R’ Star Trek, which once recruited The Revenant’s Mark L. Smith to pen a script. Now, while discussing George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat with Collider, the screenwriter went into detail about the most surprising Star Trek project of all time: “It was a different thing, but this was such a particular different type of story that Quentin wanted to tell with it that it fit my kind of sensibilities.”

It sounds like the folks at Paramount and Bad Robot, including J.J. Abrams, were on board with Tarantino taking a crack at the long-running sci-fi franchise, and so he and Smith worked on a script for a good while. It wasn’t until Tarantino started having second thoughts about Star Trek being his tenth and final film that the project started to crumble: “I remember we were talking, and he goes, “If I can just wrap my head around the idea that Star Trek could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?” And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk.”