Can We Predict The Future of Star Trek?

After failing to reach the Nielsen top 10 for streaming, Star Trek’s latest series was cancelled almost immediately after finishing its first season. Showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau gently broke the news with a letter which assured that while season 2 was still happening, it would in fact be the final season.

“It’s been my and Noga’s joy and privilege to help carry Gene Roddenberry’s extraordinary vision forward with Starfleet Academy, thanks to the hundreds of hardworking humans who pour every ounce of their talents into the work daily with imagination and reverence. We are in post-production now on what will be the second and final season. We’re so proud of what we’ve accomplished together on this show, and the world will get to see the work of these extraordinary artists when season two airs. We will finish strong.” - Joint statement by Kurtzman and Landau

Since this announcement was made everyone from around the galaxy has been throwing in their two cents. Giving opinions on why the cancellation happened and why with such lightning speed.

While making an appearance on the Onscreen and Beyond Podcast, legacy cast member Robert Picardo (The Doctor), suggested the series was a gem cut short by the ongoing culture war.

“Even though, as I said, it didn’t quite fit in with this current political, cultural moment we’re having in America, I think the show will be viewed and valued as a real gem in the future. Eventually, the pendulum always swings back towards Star Trek’s original core values.” - Picardo said on the podcast.

Meanwhile, over on X, Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner approached this news with sorrow, frankness and contemplation that comes from being over ninety and having witnessed decades of ebb and flow in a franchise with which he is forever identified.

Meanwhile, the young cast stands proud of their work, hyping season 2 while remaining defiant of the haters. Karim Diane (Jay-Den), one of two queer Klingon characters introduced this season, took to Instagram to express that pride and defiance. Both with a heartfelt video and an in your face post.

“Season 2 is GAY AF, and I have SOOOOO much bts content coming your way. Please prepare to be sick of me 😭😭 im going to be EVEN LOUDER and more annoying about this beautiful gay Klingon. we going out IN FLAMES 🔥 🔥 🔥” - Diane posted to the comments.

But here’s the thing, Starfleet Academy’s cancellation probably isn’t just about poor numbers. It probably isn’t even just about the culture war or the fact that this is another divisive crack at a YA Trek series. Because the fact is that Starfleet Academy is not just the latest Star Trek series, it is the LAST new Star Trek ANYTHING in production. Under normal circumstances it's natural to think it would make sense to slow-walk this cancellation announcement instead of speed-run it.

With Season 2 in the can, there was no great urgency to rush either the decision or the announcement and every reason Paramount/Skydance to should until something new is on the horizon before dropping the axe.

Yet here we are, with the latest new Star Trek series cancelled abruptly and nothing else in development.

Yet, if we pull out from this moment and take a look at the trend over the last few years, a picture begins to form. A picture of the most popular Star Trek series being capped at five seasons and the more experimental YA series being cancelled after just one season with the second season in the can. It is as if there are behind the scenes forces acting for reasons which the fans are scarcely aware of, moving to prevent any Star Trek series from becoming long running.

But none of this is happening in a vacuum.

The last time Alex Kurtzman renewed his contract with Paramount was in 2021 and a lot has changed since then, including a merger with Skydance and an impending acquisition of Warner Bros/Discovery. All while Kurtzman’s contract is set to expire this year, 2026. Is it a coincidence that Discovery, Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds and now Starfleet Academy all seem timed to end production before Alex Kurtzman’s contract runs up?

That’s not to say Kurtzman doesn't have several series in pre-production that have yet to be greenlit. That’s also not to say that he hasn’t been in talks with leadership about the future of Star Trek. In an interview he did with Trekmovie, he made it clear that he very much has.

“Yes, I’ve had conversations with them about the future of Star Trek. Yes, we’ve gotten nothing but support. Yes, there have been specific shows that have been discussed. And we’ll see. I’m truly at the beginning of the conversation with them now. And so I hesitate to say anything to you, because I don’t have anything to report yet. But I can report that the conversations are happening.” - Kurtzman said in the interview.

But how fruitful can such discussions be while in the midst of the very hard business of contract negotiations? What sign can we take from this cancellation about Kurtzman’s future with the company, let alone the future of Star Trek?

The series endings we have seen over the past few years are likely signs of contract negotiation strategies taking up their battle positions. By ending the Kurtzman shows, Paramount/Skydance appears ready to move on from his era and offer the next person a clean slate. Likely both parties have been hedging until now, mutually concluding the various Star Trek shows and not greenlighting any new ones so that when the time of tough negotiations arrived there wouldn't be as many game pieces on the board. Which is why it feels so deliberate that the one series for which Kurtzman had concrete future plans, perhaps even as a torch-passing show, was so mercilessly cancelled before the second season even aired.

This comes off like a shot across the bow, a statement that Paramount/Skydance does not necessarily need Kurtzman’s vision anymore.

But Kurtzman has been in this franchise for ten years and that is a LONG time. It’s possible, maybe even likely that he’s been planning for a while to walk away if the money isn't right. This could be why he has so slavishly stuck to a five season maximum rather than falling back on the seven season standard of the 90’s golden age. Maybe it was never about cutting these shows short over fan objections. Maybe it was always about protecting them by controlling when they end and seeing that each one gets its proper finale.

But maybe he also thought he could win the gamble with Starfleet Academy. His four-season plan in which two seasons were greenlit and filmed back-to-back meant that it only needed to be renewed once. So, if he walked away from the negotiation table, his co-showrunner could take the helm and finish the job. Because it was the only Star Trek series in active production, the odds of it being cancelled may have seemed next to impossible.

Yet here we are.

One other reason we may be here is because Kurtzman might possibly have some demands of a non-monetary nature. He, like many of the fans, may have concerns that Paramount/Skydance is planning a hard pivot away from progressive ideology in Star Trek. Rather they want him to reign in the "wokeness" and focus on apolitical adventure or he wants ironclad guarantees of creative freedom, this could turn into a case of irreconcilable creative differences.

Which brings us back to Starfleet Academy being cancelled after just one season.

From Kurtzman’s perspective, the cancellation might ultimately work in his favor. If he's planning to stay, it may be in his interest not to have any new Star Trek in development until he secures the deal. Walking away feels a lot stronger as a threat if the franchise has no solid direction without him and no future in sight. Unfortunately, this means that strategically, neither party benefits much from Star Trek being actively in development until the contract is settled.

Kurtzman’s era has been divisive among fans in a divided time. While some have fairly weak arguments about "wokeness", others raise legitimate critiques. But ultimately every Kurtzman-era series has left the fandom bitterly divided in one way or another. But now that this era of Star Trek may soon be ending there is nothing but uncertainty on the road ahead.

What happens next for Star Trek?

This is the question every Trekkie must be asking.

The dread right now is that we are entering another era in which the franchise goes completely dark. Memories of those years between the end of Enterprise and the release of the J.J. Abrams movie are like a deep scar, a fandom’s collective trauma now bubbling to the surface. Those memories of a beloved franchise, gone, seemingly forever, buried alive…

buried alive…

But much as Kirk escaped from the genesis cave through a clever use of coded transmissions, the situation for the franchise is not as dire as it may appear. A path forward seems to exist with or without Kurtzman’s involvement and several clues point towards what that path is and what it is not.

What it is Not.

Since the conclusion of Star Trek: Picard, fans have been rabid for a follow up series to be greenlit. Star Trek : Legacy, as pitched would have starred Jeri Ryan as Captain Seven of Nine, commanding the newly rechristened USS Enterprise-G, with Raffi as her first officer and Picard’s son Jack Crusher on the crew as they set off once again to go boldly.

Fans were told from the beginning that this was only a dream. One that with a great deal of support had a slim chance of becoming real but the odds were always against it. Terri Matalas reported in august of 2025 that he had partially completed a spec script but having gained no momentum with Parmount/Skydance on development, placed his hopes with the fans as he moved on to other projects such as Vision Quest for Disney Plus.

Marina Sirtis meanwhile had a more blunt answer to the question of Legacy.

“Legacy is never going to happen,” Sirtis said in response to a fan question during the TNG panel on the Star Trek cruise. If we are to take her word for it, as an actor who would almost certainly be approached as a recurring character were this in any stage of development, Legacy is sadly dead.

Why might an idea that has such traction with the fans not go forward?

Why is Terry Matalas not even in serious talks about developing this? Yes, he very quickly became busy with other commitments, which realistically could be the major obstacle in the way of development. Yet, there is one other, nagging possibility that demands examination.

Are we entering a post-TNG drawdown era?

It is no secret that the Ellison family who control Paramount/Skydance are friendly to Trump and the right but they also know their audiences and want to make money. Which is why they’ve tried to claim they are pushing towards political neutrality in their news acquisitions of CBS and forthcoming CNN. It’s not out of character if they want to reposition the Star Trek franchise along similar lines.

Fans and Star Trek Youtubers like Steve Shives have already connected the dots and sounded the alarm on this possibility.

Yet the Ellison’s are not stupid either, Paramount/Skydance is not stupid. They know that Star Trek is not Star Wars, rather than a broad fanbase it has a dedicated one and the success of any future film or television series relies on that foundation. So, any move they make to tone down "wokeness" can not be done in a way that will trigger backlash from the many fans who view Star Trek as a progressive franchise, which is the majority of Star Trek fans.

Yes, they could return to the Kelvin timeline. But with an aging cast who is asking for more money and a mile high pile of failed scripts, it seems as if nobody alive can crack just how to do that in a way the studio will accept.

Still, there exists inside the franchise, a series in which a less progressive approach was part of the storytelling and the fans have not only accepted that series but come to fully embrace it over time.

Star Trek Enterprise is unique in all of Star Trek because it isn’t always progressive and sometimes even leans a little to the right. The series premiered shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and continued through the War on Terror years. Rather than take any kind of hard anti-war stance, which may have gone badly on the heels of the post-9/11-pre-Iraq wave of patriotic zeal, Enterprise folded some of those themes into its storytelling and it worked because of the setting.

The Xindi arc, for instance, sometimes played a bit like 24 in space. Adding a team of MACO space marines to the ship as Archer and crew pushed right up against the line (occasionally stepping way over it) in their desperation to save the Earth. The show was able to pose hard questions without taking a hard stance, which seems to have worked.

The early Starfleet era gets away with being a tiny bit less progressive than the rest of Star Trek because the galaxy is still a rough place and humanity is finding itself. Humans are still violent, bigoted and reactionary as they set out into a mostly hostile cosmos in which their only allies, the Vulcans are unhelpful and untrustworthy. In this setting the audience willingly accepted a slightly more conservative Star Trek.

This reason may be why the most promising current series pitch we know of, Star Trek: United, is gaining such traction and feels much more like a real possibility than Legacy. Dreamed up by Mike Sussman, the writer behind the classic Enterprise two-parter, In A Mirror Darkly. Star Trek: United is a loose sequel to Enterprise, set in the early days of the Federation and starring Scott Bakula (who is all in) as President Archer, it’s styled as a political thriller and has proven just as popular with the fans as Legacy.

This series may just be closer to what the Ellisons could have in mind. United would be a high-stakes narrative set in a hard-edged galaxy still recovering from a devastating war with the Romulans. A setting like this could, much like Enterprise, get away with easing up on heavy handed progressive ideology without feeling like a betrayal of the franchise. Which, I think is why the pitch is far from dead on arrival and each update makes it feel like not so much wishful thinking as a series with a solid chance of being greenlit soon-ish.

Recently, on the All Access Star Trek Podcast, actor John Billingsley, who portrayed Doctor Phlox on Enterprise, has expressed his interest in returning for the proposed series… Although he seems to want the entire Enterprise cast apart from him and Bakula killed off.

“[Archer] is older. He’s probably got rickets, and he needs somebody at his back. Dominic [Keating, Malcom Reed], I think his character is in prison at this point, Jolene [Blalock, T’Pol] is gone. Hoshi died. I think I’m the only one left standing that could possibly appear on the show… Jeffrey Combs [Shran], he’s dead too… Oh no, Mayweather’s dead?” Billingsly said on the podcast.

But it’s not just actors, the Youtube channel Scifinatics has thrown it’s full support behind this pitch, going so far as to put together a spec opening. Star Trek Veterans like Andrew Probert, who famously designed the Enterprise-D, and Emmy winning VFX artist Robert Bonchune have come out of the woodwork to assist with Sussman’s pitch. This level of confidence from both the fans and classic Star Trek insiders doesn’t guarantee the series will happen but it does show the idea is something special.

But United does have one element in its favor which comes directly from the cancellation of Starfleet Academy. The recent series built a massive standing academy set and two seasons is not enough to justify the cost. Star Trek is famous for repurposing sets and the next series will almost without a doubt be expected to reuse this one. And here we have a pitch for a planet-based show, set primarily on the Babel colony, which can with a little effort be built around the redressed Academy sets.

The same reasons which would make United potentially appealing to Paramount/Skydance are also perhaps why the only plot details we have for any future movie is that of the reported Star Trek Origin film, set prior to the events of Enterprise. We know that some Star Trek film is on track for production. While no details are forthcoming that confirm it is the origin movie, we have recently been given some major information about the time period in which that movie would be set. The latest Star Trek Online update may be a revealing clue towards the future movie plans. Providing a background for Starfleet's origins as pirate hunters in the Pre-Enterprise era, this feels like the perfect setting for an apolitical, J.J. Abrams style, action-driven Star Trek film. A space pirate epic is exactly the sort of broad-appeal adventure popcorn movie that Paramount/Skydance probably wants to lean into.

Yet, if Kurtzman remains in charge there is a chance the Star Trek : Year One pitch, which would continue the adventures of the Enterprise under Captain Kirk, could materialize. The problem with this pitch, as I see it is, it doesn’t feel as if it has legs. Not only is this idea boxed in by the single-year timeframe, which suggests a brief one or two season series. It also hinges on an actor who is already years older than Shatner was in TOS continuing to portray a younger Kirk.

But the real issue is that the concept doesn’t feel as if it’s bringing anything unique to the table, at best it feels like an extra season of Strange New Worlds sans Pike and at worst an attempt to just remake TOS with the new cast. Ultimately, it isn’t a terrible idea but the scope feels so limited that it probably works best as a Long Trek or miniseries.

On the opposite-end of the spectrum is the unnamed Tawny Newsome comedy series. The scripts have reportadly been written and that’s something... But, so far this one feels like a bit of a dark horse. The slow development may be because Kurtzman won’t commit to anything else until his contract is secured and its continued development may hinge on if Kurtzman stays.

Ultimately I suspect (or hope) that all contract questions will be settled before September 8th and Star Trek Day 2026 will be filled with 60th anniversary announcements of newly greenlit projects including films and TV series.

My speculative conclusion is that the looming threat of an impending long- term Star Trek hiatus on TV is almost certainly an illusion born of contract negotiations and Enterprise anxiety. However, what little evidence exists does support the idea of a potential shift back to the prequel setting for the near future, especially should Kurtzman’s era come to a close.

It is likely that nothing new will be finalized until we know if Kurtzman is staying and then probably at least a couple new films and series will be announced as soon as Star Trek Day. Because I refuse to believe they will blow the 60th anniversary.

I could of course be wrong about everything.