Star Trek races to announce it’s getting a new movie too, okay?

Although there’s been a fair amount of ink spilled, over the last few years, about the ways Disney’s Star Wars movie franchise kind of fell off a cliff in the immediate aftermath of The Rise Of Skywalker, it’s worth remember that Star Trek has had it a hell of a lot worse. Although Trek’s television fortunes are doing pretty great at the moment—four series and counting, mostly well-received, right now—the series has been in retreat at the box office for fully eight years at this point, after the under-performance of 2016's Star Trek: Beyond. (To the point that franchise star Chris Pine—a Major Movie Star!—has said more than once than he has absolutely no clue whether he still has that job, for all that the official line is that “Star Trek 4" is still in “active development.”)

But in the wake of Star Wars making noises this week indicating that it’s getting back into the movie-making tauntaun saddle with a film based on its beloved Mandalorian characters, we guess Star Trek needed to remind everybody that it’s still out there, potentially dominating the box office, too. Per Deadline, Paramount has let it be known that it’s started working with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot on a new Star Trek movie, even poaching some talent from the competition by hiring Andor’s Toby Haynes to direct. (Seth Grahme-Smith is writing, although details about the plot/concept/etc. are, unsurprisingly, zilcho at the moment.)

What we do know is how incredibly badly potential cinematic Star Trek spin-offs have fared over the last decade: Quentin Tarantino’s abortive effort to make a Star Trek—a project we’re still not entirely convinced wasn’t a joke that got massively out of hand—was the most obvious, but there was also the version of a potential Star Trek 4 which was being helmed by Fargo’s Noah Hawley. None of which came even remotely close to fruition.

Weirdly, this isn’t the first time the concept of a new Trek movie had come up in the last few weeks; in a recent interview, series stalwart Patrick Stewart expressed his hope at getting one more outing in theaters for his particular coterie of Next Generation/Picard heroes.