'Wrath of Khan' director Nicholas Meyer supposedly pitched a new Star Trek film to Paramount

Nicholas Meyer has and always shall be our friend. Recently chatting with TrekMovie.com, the filmmaker revealed that he pitched a mystery Star Trek film to Paramount Pictures. Meyer, of course, directed 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which is widely considered the gold standard for the franchise's presence on the big screen. Working with his creative/producing partner, Steven-Charles Jaffe (The Fly II), the director apparently wrote "a whole treatment and plan" for a fresh adventure set within the world of Starfleet.

"We didn’t write a whole script," Meyer said. "We wrote a very detailed treatment and a whole pitch doc with illustrations. It’s [a] very comprehensive thing ... first we took it to Alex Kurtzman, then we took it to J.J. [Abrams], and then we took it to [studio head] Emma Watts at Paramount."

It's unclear when the pitch was done or how it was received, although Paramount may have passed or at least shelved it because the studio's currently moving forward on a new movie with Kalinda Vasquez (The Walking Dead) attached as writer. And before that, the studio, which hit a Trek-based snag last summer, was entertaining fresh projects from Noah Hawley and Quentin Tarantino, as well as a possible fourth entry in the "Kelvin" univese. 

Abrams, who revamped the United Federation of Planets back in 2009, will produce the Vasquez-written feature under his Bad Robot banner. Kurtzman, who co-wrote the first two rebooted Star Trek films — including 2013's Into Darkness, which borrowed heavily from Wrath of Khan — is now in charge of the entire IP at Paramount+.

According to Meyer, his and Jaffe's idea had the potential for film or television, and would have stood apart from all the canon that had come before. It also would have featured "new characters," but beyond that tease, the filmmaker was light on specific details, perhaps hinting that the project might still see the light of day.

"It was a detailed proposal for what could have been a film, or it could have been a series, or it could have been a film leading to a series or a series leading to a film… It could be a series of films. Yeah, absolutely," he continued. "This was an independent piece of the Star Trek universe based on holes in the chronology, which would allow for the insertion of original material."

After Wrath of Khan, Meyer went on to co-write the screenplays for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). In addition, he served as a consulting producer on 13 episodes of Star Trek: Discovery.