Star Trek's Future Includes More Movies, More TV, and More Michelle Yeoh

Image: Paramount

Star Trek’s streaming revival finds itself at a bit of a crossroads. Discovery, the series that brought the show back to its current heights, is preparing to begin its final season next week—and Picard, arguably one of its biggest successes, came to an end last year. But things ending has never stopped Star Trek from looking ahead to what’s next, and there’s plenty on the way.

As part of a wide ranging feature for Variety, Paramount has revealed a swath of hints about what to expect as Star Trek transitions from the stable of shows it has developed in the years since Discovery revived the franchise in 2017 (for what was then CBS All Access, now Paramount+), to a franchise looking to push itself on screens big and small once again.

Several of the shows that form Star Trek’s current streaming era will of course continue—like the smash-hit success Strange New Worlds, currently filming its third season; the animated series Lower Decks; and the kids-focused 3DCG series Prodigy, which has found a new streaming home at Netflix after being suddenly and controversially axed from Paramount+ last year. But now Star Trek’s future beyond them is anchored in not just at least one more new TV show—the upcoming Starfleet Academy, now explicitly confirmed to be set in the 32nd Century setting established by Discovery’s last three seasons—but experimentations in film in both theatrical and streaming formats.

The most major of these is Section 31, the Michelle Yeoh-helmed series-pitch-turned-streaming film that follows her Discovery character, Phillipa Georgiou (actually the Mirror Universe variant of Yeoh’s character, who perished in its opening episodes) as she finds herself involved in the titular shady Starfleet secret police division introduced in Deep Space Nine. It’s now seemingly been confirmed that Section 31 will be set in the time period between Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and Star Trek: The Next Generation, as a major character joining Yeoh in the film will be a young Rachel Garrett, played by Kacey Rohl—the captain of the Enterprise-C introduced in the TNG episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Also floated as a potential continuation of this streaming movie format beyond Section 31 is more from the world ofStar Trek: Picard—apparently not the so-called Legacy spinoff cast and crew have been asking for since the series concluded last year, but a movie previously teased by Patrick Stewart that would, presumably, continue to focus on Picard after the events of the show.

Paramount+ is not the only home for future Star Trek film content however. Plans are still underway to make a fourth and final film with the remaining cast of the Star Trek 2009 reboot movie—known as the alternate “Kelvin Timeline” continuity—with The Flight Attendant’s Steve Yockey drafting the latest script for the latest iteration of the film, which has been trying to get off the ground in various forms since 2018, having most recently lost director Matt Shakman to Marvel’s The Fantastic Four. Further along the line than Star Trek 4, however, is another tentpole Trek movie: first reported on earlier this year as being written by Seth Grahame-Smith and directed by Andor’s Toby Haynes, this film is now explicitly described as “an origin story of sorts” for, not as previously assumed, the aforementioned Kelvin timeline, but the “Prime” Star Trek canon, suggesting a return to the time period first explored in Star Trek: Enterprise.

All this, of course, remains in flux—Star Trek has few rivals in the Hollywood world when it comes to announced projects not actually making it out to audiences in one form or another (the galaxy far, far away says hello to its fellow Star franchise). But suffice to say Paramount has big, big plans for Star Trek in a bunch of forms across TV and film, and they’re unlikely to slow down any time soon.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

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