Update: December 7, 2017
Quentin Tarantino's STAR TREK Will Be Rated R; Mark L. Smith Frontrunner to Write
After Deadline this week revealed that Quentin Tarantino pitched a
Star Trek film to JJ Abrams and Paramount, the whole thing is moving at warp speed. Tarantino met for hours in a writers room with Mark L. Smith, Lindsey Beer, and Drew Pearce. They kicked around ideas and one of them will get the job. Deadline is hearing the frontrunner is Smith, who wrote
The Revenant.
The film will most certainly go where no
Star Trek has gone before: Tarantino has required it to be R rated, and Paramount and Abrams agreed to that condition. Most mega budget tent poles restrict the film to a PG-13 rating in an effort to maximize the audience. That was the reason that Guillermo Del Toro’s $150 million
At The Mountains of Madness didn’t go forward at Universal, even though Tom Cruise was ready to star. The exception to this rule was Fox’s
Deadpool, but that film started out with modest ambitions before it caught on and became the biggest R rated film ever.
That rating was crucially important to Tarantino, who hopes to direct this
Star Trek and who has helmed R rated films his entire career. Imagine how this could open storytelling lanes, or even what the banter on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise might be, if you conjure up memories of the conversations between Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in
Pulp Fiction, or the banter at the diner between robbers before the heist gone wrong that triggered the action in
Reservoir Dogs.
Smith is best known for writing the Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu-directed
The Revenant and subsequently overhauled
Overlord, the WWII thriller that Abrams’ Bad Robot is producing for Paramount. Pearce’s script credits include
Iron Man 3, Sherlock Holmes 3, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and the TV series
Runaway TV; he just directed his script
Hotel Artemis; Beer’s credits are mostly upcoming, and include the Doug Liman-directed
Chaos Walking, as well as
Godzilla Vs. Kong, Masters of the Universe, Barbarella and
Dungeons and Dragons, all big scale stuff.
They will lock one of the three quickly (if there is a front runner, it might be Smith), and the film will be scripted based on Tarantino’s idea while Tarantino is filming his next film about the Manson summer of 1969, which got set at Sony and has
I, Tonya‘s Margot Robbie poised to play Sharon Tate, and Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt all having met with the filmmaker about roles.
Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Star Trek’ Will Be R-Rated: ‘The Revenant’s Mark L. Smith Frontrunner Scribe