Why Simon Pegg Thinks Star Trek Is Forever Tainted

The last “Star Trek” feature film released in theaters was “Star Trek Beyond” back in 2016. The movie was directed by Justin Lin, the filmmaker behind “Better Luck Tomorrow” and several of the “Fast and Furious” movies, and it was co-written by Simon Pegg, who also played Scotty in the film. “Beyond,” the third film in the Kelvin timeline, was … pretty good. The action was clear and the character work was solid — the entire cast brought their A-games — but the film overall was generic action nonsense; it was the fourth “Star Trek” film in a row about a twisted villain on a mission of revenge. Sadly, “Beyond” wasn’t as big a hit as Paramount wanted, and it seemed to be the end of the road for “Star Trek” in theaters.

Ever since, though, Paramount has been persistently struggling to make a fourth “Star Trek” movie set in the Kelvin timeline. As of this writing, some new plans are afoot to finally make said film along with a prequel movie set at an earlier point in the “Star Trek” timeline. Given how many false starts there have been on “Star Trek 4,” however, one will simply have to bide their time to see if anything comes to fruition.

Because of the many, many difficulties in bringing “Star Trek 4” to the big screen, one might begin to assume it is “cursed.” At the very least, each passing day makes it that much more difficult to get a movie made. It certainly didn’t help that one of the film’s main cast members, Anton Yelchin, died in a car accident in 2016. If “Star Trek 4” gets made, it will have to explain why Yelchin’s character, Pavel Chekov, is absent.

In an interview with Katee Sackhoff on “The Sackhoff Show,” Pegg talked a little bit about his “Star Trek” experiences. In doing so, he admitted he has a hard time imagining “Star Trek 4” ever getting made, seeing as it would be “tainted” by Yelchin’s absence.

Pegg, of course, said he’d love to return as Scotty and very much enjoys working with his co-stars from the “Star Trek” Kelvin timeline films, which also includes Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldaña, John Cho, and Karl Urban as younger, sexier versions of the characters from the original 1966 “Star Trek” TV series. But as much as Pegg likes collaborating with that ensemble and would be happy to reunite with them, he feels that Yelchin’s death would be too glaring to ignore. In his own words:

“I’d love to do more. Obviously, it’s been forever tainted because we lost Anton, and that was a really hard thing for everyone involved, and for the real world, let alone anything else. If we do come back, if there is another opportunity to come back, I’d love to. Because as we were saying earlier on, it’s a group of guys that I dearly, dearly love and don’t get to see very often […] It would be good to get back together with them.”

There is an additional issue with making a “Star Trek 4” at this late date: the “younger” actors from the 2009 film are now older than their original series counterparts in 1966. When James Doohan played Scotty on “Star Trek,” he was 46. Pegg, in 2024, is already 54. If the selling point of the Kelvin timeline was to present younger, more passionate, hot-headed versions of the “Star Trek” characters we love, then the cast has kind of aged out.

There’s also the financial reality of Paramount overspending on “Star Trek” since the debut of Paramount+ in 2017. There was a brief time when the market was flooded and several “Star Trek” shows were running simultaneously. Recently, however, many of those shows have been canceled, and far fewer “Star Trek” projects are in the works than have been in the past. A fourth Kelvin “Star Trek” movie might just be too much for the franchise to withstand at this point.