‘Star Trek 4’ Writers Detail How Chris Hemsworth’s George Kirk Would Return In Abandoned Sequel

Amazon’s massively expensive fantasy streaming series, “The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power” has wrapped up its first season, headed by showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay. Before the two landed the high-profile prequel show they were asked to help pen a fourth “Star Trek” film after uncredited contributions to “Star Trek Beyond.” Sadly, the project that had S.J. Clarkson (“Jessica Jones”) attached to direct eventually was nixed after Paramount couldn’t secure deals with talent, which certainly echoes the recent problems the studio is having. Director Matt Shakman (“WandaVision”) exited “Star Trek 4” for Marvel’s “Fantastic Four” reboot not too long after it was reported the cast hadn’t officially signed on, contracts being the main roadblock.

During a recent interview with Esquire, the pair of writers detailed their abandoned version of “Star Trek 4” which they worked on for two years that would have attempted to pair Chris Pine’s Captain James T. Kirk with his father, George Kirk, played by actor Chris Hemsworth in the first film from 2009. Also, citing two movies that would be comparable to what they were planning on doing.

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“The conceit was that through a cosmic quirk in the ‘Star Trek’ world, [Pine and Hemsworth’s characters] were the same age. It was going to be a father-son space adventure—think ‘Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade’ in space. We were really thrilled about it. We had an original villain and a really cool ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’-esque sci-fi idea at the core,” McKay said of the unmade project.

With some prompting from McKay, Payne continued to explain what their angle on the sequel would be and how they were going to bring back Hemsworth’s character. 

“There’s an episode of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ called ‘Relics’ where they find Scotty, who’s been trapped in a transporter for a couple of decades, and they’re able to have a cool adventure with him,” Payne said. “Our conceit was, ‘What if right before the Kelvin impacted with that huge mining ship, George Kirk had tried to beam himself over to his wife’s shuttle where his son, Jim Kirk, had just been born? And what if the ship hadn’t completely exploded—what if it left some space junk?’ Think about when you send a text message and you’ve typed it out, but you haven’t quite hit send. On the other side, they see those three little dots that someone has typed. It’s like the transporter had absorbed his pattern up into the pattern buffer, but hadn’t spit him out on the other side. It was actually a saved copy of him that was in the computer.”

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McKay added, “So the adventure is that Chris Pine and the crew of the Enterprise have to seek out the wreckage of the ship that his father died on because of a mystery and a new villain. On the ship, they stumble across his father’s pattern. They beam him out and he has no idea that no time has passed at all, and that he’s looking at his son. Then the adventure goes from there.”

Hemsworth is still game to come back to work with Pine while speaking with ET Canada over the summer.

Taking cues from existing “Star Trek” mythology sounds on par for a neat sci-fi plot, too bad that version of the film likely won’t see the light of the day as Paramount seemingly had moved on with a different incarnation. However, with the studio removing “Star Trek 4” from its release slate after setting it for December 2023, there seem to be even more hiccups for the film.