The next Star Trek movie is taking the bold risk that Star Wars has been too afraid to execute.
Star Trek is heading in a new direction that will hopefully allow the franchise to live long and prosper. In 2025, Paramount hired Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley to write and direct a new Star Trek movie. At SDCC 2026, Goldstein and Daley confirmed that their Star Trek movie will be a complete reboot featuring a new cast of characters.
“It won’t be the characters that you’ve seen previously in your Star Trek movies,” Goldstein said. “So there will be a new take on that.”
The creative duo recently told Inverse that the movie will look at the “institution of Starfleet” and what it does, both the good and the bad.
“And while this [script] isn’t a cynical or nihilistic take on it, I think it does acknowledge that there are some bad apples in every institution that can have a strong voice and can really make an impact on that institution and everything it stands for,” Daley said.
Training Day and Crimson Tide are the two comps the duo is using to describe their new Star Trek.
“It takes place almost in real time, and it just is a whole other look at what a Star Trek movie could be without betraying the fundamentals of what it should be,” Daley said.
What Goldstein and Daley are saying would scare the executives at Lucasfilm. This new Star Trek movie is exactly what Star Wars needed to do a year ago.
Star Trek telling a new story with fresh characters is what Star Wars never did
The problem with Star Wars, especially with the movies, is the inability to let go of the past. No matter how hard Lucasfilm tries, they find a way to incorporate familiar characters and storylines into new stories. In other words, Lucasfilm can’t move on from the Skywalker Saga.
Even when they tried to move on from the Skywalker Saga, Lucasfilm decided to turn their most popular television show into a movie with The Mandalorian and Grogu, so audiences were familiar with the characters. This failure to innovate has plagued the Star Wars franchise this decade.
Star Trek is doing what Star Wars has failed to do: take a risk. Similar to Star Wars, Star Trek has spent the last decade as a television property, with 2016 being the last time a Star Trek movie hit theaters. This is the perfect time to introduce a fresh story with unique characters.
It might upset some diehard fans that Kirk or Spock won’t be in this next movie, but most of the general audience has little to no relationship with those legacy characters. Let new fans come into Star Trek without having to do any homework. The fundamentals of a Star Trek movie will still be there.
It sounds like Goldstein and Daley are making a film for new and old fans, which is precisely the type of risk Star Trek should be taking.
