This is out of left field but I'm going to be first in line: Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Star Trek’ Will Be R-Rated: ‘The Revenant’s Mark L. Smith Frontrunner Scribe EXCLUSIVE: After Deadline this week revealed that Quentin Tarantino pitched aStar Trek film to JJ Abrams and Paramount, the whole thing is moving at warp speed. Tarantino met for hours in a writers room with Mark L. Smith, Lindsey Beer, Drew Pearce and Megan Amram. They kicked around ideas and one of them will get the job. I’m hearing the frontrunner is Smith, who wrote The Revenant. The film will most certainly go where no Star Trek has gone before: Tarantino has required it to be R rated, and Paramount and Abrams agreed to that condition. Most mega budget tent poles restrict the film to a PG-13 rating in an effort to maximize the audience. That was the reason that Guillermo Del Toro’s $150 million At The Mountains of Madnessdidn’t go forward at Universal, even though Tom Cruise was ready to star. The exception to this rule was Fox’s Deadpool, but that film started out with modest ambitions before it caught on and became the biggest R rated film ever. That rating was crucially important to Tarantino, who hopes to direct this Star Trek and who has helmed R rated films his entire career. Imagine how this could open storytelling lanes, or even what the banter on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise might be, if you conjure up memories of the conversations between Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, or the banter at the diner between robbers before the heist gone wrong that triggered the action in Reservoir Dogs. Smith is best known for writing the Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu-directed The Revenant and subsequently overhauled Overlord, the WWII thriller that Abrams’ Bad Robot is producing for Paramount. Pearce’s script credits include Iron Man 3, Sherlock Holmes 3, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and the TV series Runaway TV; he just directed his script Hotel Artemis; Beer’s credits are mostly upcoming, and include the Doug Liman-directed Chaos Walking, as well as Godzilla Vs. Kong, Masters of the Universe, Barbarellaand Dungeons and Dragons, all big scale stuff. They will lock one of the three quickly (if there is a front runner, it might be Smith), and the film will be scripted based on Tarantino’s idea while Tarantino is filming his next film about the Manson summer of 1969, which got set at Sony and has I, Tonya‘s Margot Robbie poised to play Sharon Tate, and Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt all having met with the filmmaker about roles.
SMH Tarantino will bastardize the Trek Franchise with his typical infantile over-simplified dialogue and his self-indulgent gore-infused fight scenes. I can just see the purple Klingon blood splattering across the face of a foul-mouthed Kirk while an enraged Spock uses his lirpa to disembowel a gorn after Uhura endured hours of being raped and repeatedly called the "n" word. No thanks. Tarantino's low-brow approach to filmmaking is the antithesis of everything that Star Trek represents.
I'm OK with an R-rated Star Trek, it just can't be gratuitous. I love Tarantino's movies, but I'm not sure if he can pull back the reins.
As a huge fan of all things Star Trek, I totally disagree. Mostly because the movies have very little legacy and are largely not very good. The only way to "bastardize" the star trek franchise would be through TV imo. I have absolutely no problems with a different approach being taken to the movies.
I may end up hating the effort, but I think there's plenty of space in the Star Trek universe for an R rated version. Where the series and a few of the films shined were that they had strong stories. Too many of the movies suffered from bad scripts, and the reboots, which started off strong, I thought, now seems more like an excuse to have some cool special effects. Maybe this will have a strong story to tell, and we can finally see Kirk getting nasty with some of those alien chicks he constantly chased. Yeah, I'd like to see that.
To those of y'all that hate it. Did you like what Abrams was doing? Because if he's greenlighting it, it's probably something you'd like (if you liked Abrams). I don't necessarily see him being on board with this just because it's Tarantino.
Looking forward to one day opening iTunes and seeing this under the “New and Noteworthy” category. Same with Overlord as well.
For those of you who oppose the idea... were you in such an uproar when ST IV and ST V were made? Those things were absolute turds. Whatever Tarantino does with the movie, it can't be worse than those. I'm curious to see how it comes out. We've never seen an R-rated Trek movie. And Tarantino's style is a mixture of (a) scenes that contain extensive exchanges in dialogue and (b) over-the-top-and-fake-but-we'll-forgive-it-because-it's-cool action and violence scenes. Neither of those seems to fit well with a Trek movie. I like Tarantino's plot twists, story developments, dialogue, characters, and soundtracks.... I generally DON'T like the way he ends his movies. I'm looking forward to it. Why not? It's only a movie.
