New Star Trek movie being penned by Kalinda Vazquez, who's named after a TOS character

A new, completely original, Star Trek movie is in the works. Deadline is reporting that writer and producer Kalinda Vazquez (Star Trek: Discovery, Fear the Walking Dead, Runaways) has been tapped to write an original movie for Paramount, with J. J. Abrams’ Bad Robot company producing.

Vazquez is a lifelong Trekkie; her first name, Kalinda, came from the Star Trek TOS episode “By Any Other Name,” where there was a character named Kelinda, a seemingly humanoid but ultimately many-tentacled alien of the Kelvan Empire. On the professional front, Vazquez is a producer on Star Trek: Discovery and received writing credits for the episode, “Terra Firma, Part 2,” and the 2019 Pike-era Short Trek, “Ask Not.”

If Vazquez’s movie makes it to production, it would be the first Star Trek feature film to come out since Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto led a star-studded cast in 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, which Bad Robot also produced.

Other attempts to get a Star Trek film made in recent years have not been successful. Quentin Tarantino had planned to make an R-rated Star Trek movie for years, but announced at the end of 2019 that he was steering away from the project. Legion creator Noah Hawley also had a project in the works at Paramount, but his movie was put on pause in August 2020 as the production company wanted to regroup and decide where it wanted to take the franchise.

With Paramount announcing their new Trek movie with Vazquez at the helm, perhaps the company has decided where it wants to take the Star Trek universe. What direction that is, however, remains to be seen, as there’s no news yet on the plot, much less who will be cast or when the film would go into production.