“Planet of the Titans” wasn’t the most harmonious project behind the scenes, but in the end, it sounds like its cancellation came down to one frustrating factor: the taste (or historic lack thereof) of studio executives. David V. Picker, who was president of Paramount motion pictures around this time, admitted that the “Star Trek” movie was the only project he ever worked on that he was “simply not interested in.” In the franchise’s oral history, Picker revealed that he “disliked sci-fi,” and that if he had been asked to greenlight George Lucas’ “Star Wars,” he no doubt would’ve said no to that, too. Barry Diller, who was CEO of Paramount Pictures at the time, also wanted to move the company back towards the TV space, according to Gross and Altman.
Accounts differ on whether or not Paramount even looked at the final version of the “Planet of the Titans” script. Scott said that he turned in a script that was finished on the fly, as the group was still not in agreement about various story elements. “We were in very short time of our delivery date,” he recalled. “We made various amendments, wrote the script, went to the studio with it, and they turned it down.” After their departure, Kaufman remembers still working on another script — and being on a roll with it, having finally felt that he cracked the story — when Isenberg called to tell him it was canceled. “They said there’s no future in science fiction,” he recalls the producer saying, in what must be one of the most painfully ironic moments in Hollywood history. “”They just canceled it,” Kaufman claimed. “They never saw my treatment, nobody read it.”
After seven months of toiling, the project was dead on arrival. Fans never got to see Toshiro Mifune play a “Star Trek” villain, nor Nimoy’s Spock go fully sex-crazy during pon farr, nor the Enterprise crew inspire the future of mankind from the prehistoric days on. We never saw what early “Star Trek” might look like when its blueprint wasn’t TV, but some of the best science fiction films of all time. In fact, fans never really got to see what “Star Trek” would have looked like in the ’70s, if it had been reborn into a decade of fantastic, stylish, groundbreaking cinema.
According to Den of Geek, Scott and Bryant celebrated the end of their “Star Trek” journey with a goodbye party, where they were given gifts like aspirin and anti-“Trek” T-shirts. Kaufman would go on to put Nimoy in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and says he gave him some Spock-like qualities in that film on purpose. And “Star Trek” itself would survive and thrive, albeit a little bit later, a little bit smaller-scale, and without the too-good-to-be-true team that had been assembled to work on “Planet of the Titans.”
