Star Trek turns 60 this year — a landmark for one of science fiction’s most enduring franchises — and it marked the occasion with a major announcement at CinemaCon 2026: a new Star Trek film is (allegedly) officially in the works.
In July 2024, Paramount announced its $8 billion merger with Skydance, which closed just over a year later. Now, a potential acquisition by Warner Bros. Discovery looms on the horizon after Netflix unexpectedly withdrew from its own bid. Paramount has publicly positioned Star Trek as a key priority going forward, which at least signals the franchise isn’t being abandoned — just reorganized.
At CinemaCon 2026, Paramount Skydance revealed that Star Trek’s future is not on the small screen but on the big screen. The media company confirmed at the convention that “the previously announced new Star Trek movie is STILL in development and will feature ‘an entirely new cast and story’ that’s ‘separate from the Chris Pine-led timeline that’s been in limbo for years,’ according to Collider’s on-the-scene reporter, Britta DeVore.”
Paramount Skydance kept details about the new film brief. However, the message was clear: Star Trek is heading back to the big screen. In the years between 2016’s Star Trek Beyond and today, Paramount greenlit, and then quietly shelved, a dizzying number of Star Trek movie projects, and a few of those technically remain in limbo with no public cancellation announcement.
Read on to see EWK about the future of those projects:
Seth Grahame-Smith & Toby Haynes’ Star Trek Film
The Seth Grahame-Smith and Toby Haynes‘ Star Trek film was teased in early 2024 as a Starfleet origin story. Sources told Deadline that “while plot details are being kept under wraps, the project is an origin story that takes place decades before the 2009 Star Trek film that rebooted the franchise.”
This one was ambiguous from the start about whether it would be set in the Kelvin timeline or the Prime universe post-Enterprise. Producer Simon Kinberg (X-Men, early-stage new Star Wars trilogy) was reportedly being eyed for the project as of May 2024.
In August 2025, Kinberg told Bleeding Cool,
It’s an extraordinary honor to be involved in Star Trek. It’s something that I grew up watching that my dad passed down to me. He’s passed away, but I’m sure he’d be very proud that I’m involved. It’s a fascinating world because of all the different tendrils it now has. Alex Kurtzman has done such a wonderful job with television shows and obviously people before him as well, so it’s cool, and it’s a new world.
However, Trekkies have received no new news about this project since.
Patrick Stewart’s Picard Film
Sir Patrick Stewart has been teasing his big screen return to the Star Trek franchise for years. In 2022, I revealed at MovieWeb that Stewart wasn’t ruling out his return to the big screen in a new Star Trek film, if it featured the rest of the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast.
And indeed, a Jean-Luc Picard film was announced shortly after Picard Season 3 wrapped in 2023. Stewart himself announced plans for a Picard movie continuation were in the works. He had seemingly been content to close the book on Jean-Luc, then changed his mind.
In his own words (as reported at The Mary Sue), Stewart teased in 2024:
I heard only last night about a [movie] script that is being written, but written specifically with the actor, Patrick, to play in it. And I’ve been told to expect to receive it within a week or so. I’m so excited because it sounds like the kind of project where the experimentation that I want to do will be essential for this kind of material. It’s good at 83…
No updates have emerged.
Kalinda Vazquez’s Star Trek Film
Star Trek: Discovery alum Kalinda Vazquez was tapped to script an original Star Trek film way back in 2021, according to Variety. Technically not canceled, as we don’t know if it was set in the Prime Universe, Kelvin Universe, or elsewhere. Also, effectively a ghost.
With the Goldstein/Daley project now the clear flagship of Paramount’s Trek film strategy post-merger, the odds of any of those three ever materializing feel slim at best. But, while the course ahead is still uncertain, and I’m skeptical that a David Ellison-led company can stay true to the core messages of Gene Roddenberry‘s wagon train to the stars, for the first time in a while, there’s at least a heading charted.
Keep up with all of The Beat’s Star Trek coverage here.
