Star Trek hasn’t really taken off as a film franchise in the way that Paramount had hoped for. Perhaps it would have been more successful in a world without Star Wars movies, but now that Disney is giving people annual installments of space adventure, that leaves Star Trek trying to carve out its own niche. It hasn’t helped that the sequels have produced diminishing returns at the box office, so it’s likely that if Star Trek 4 isn’t a hit, that’s likely all Paramount will do with the property for a while until they decided to reboot it all over again.

Keeping all of that in mind, it’s not too difficult to believe that Paramount may be working on multiple scripts for the fourth installment. Speaking to Entertainment Tonight Canada [via Dark Horizons], Zachary Quinto revealed that multiple scripts are possibly being worked on right now:

“First of all, I think there’s a couple of scripts. Because there was a script being written before Quentin Tarantino came up with his idea for a potential film. And so I think they are kind of developing more than one. So I don’t know what is going to happen. Quentin is off doing another movie.

 

So, I feel like we are in a state of anticipation. All of us are really excited about the idea of working with Quentin on a Trek film, but I know Simon Pegg and Doug Jung, who wrote the last film, are writing a script and there are another set of writers writing a script. So I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Presumably, one of these scripts is the time-travel one where Chris Hemsworth returns to play George Kirk, then there’s Tarantino’s movie, and then there could be an entirely different script that goes off in its own direction.

I really liked Star Trek Beyond, and I don’t want to see the Trek film franchise die, especially since we now have Trek back on TV with Star Trek: Discovery. While we can argue about what represents the true spirit of Trek, I think having the property out there in the world is a good thing because it directs people back to the older series and older films. Here’s hoping that Star Trek 4 doesn’t stay mired in development hell.