SEPTEMBER 22, 2021 - In case you missed it: as Paramount Pictures Chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos stepped down last week (making way for replacement Brian Robbins), his departing memo to his staff has been gaining some attention in the Star Trek community. In the memo, Gianopulos held up Star Trek as an example of an existing cinematic franchise built up under his leadership, and he indicated that there are more Star Trek films in the works than we thought. 

News of the Gianopulos memo came to us from The Hollywood Reporter.

In the memo, Gianopulos said, “Paramount has been synonymous with great theatrical entertainment, and together, we have [...] helped build new cinematic worlds, [...] and elevated existing ones, like Transformers and, Star Trek (with new films in the works), among others.”

The key word here is “films”, meaning more than one.

While the rumor mill is always going on about Star Trek films in or out of production, Gianopulos’s memo would appear to be the first executive-level acknowledgment of multiple films in production this year. We’ve already had official confirmation of one film in production: In April, Paramount Pictures announced a June 9, 2023 release for a new Star Trek film. The announcement came weeks after Deadline reported that Star Trek: Discovery writer Kalinda Vazquez had been tapped to write a film, to be produced by J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot. So imagine the surprise when, in July, Paramount revealed that the June 2023 film would be not be the Vazquez script, but something else. (Matt Shakman will direct, and Lindsey Beer and Geneva Robertson-Dworet are writing, with Bad Robot still producing.)

Could the “films” Gianopulos mentioned include the Vazquez script? We don’t know. At this time, there has been no indication that a script from Vazquez has been put aside, and no new information has been released on that project. Regardless, it’s not uncommon for multiple franchise films to be “in the works” simultaneously, and the meaning of “in the works” is suitably broad.

The thing to take away here is that it’s likely we will hear more about plans for a revitalization of the Star Trek film franchise, in the not-too-distant future.