Star Trek 4 Should Replace Captain Kirk With Young Picard
The next Star Trek film should leap ahead in the Kelvin timeline to showcase a new version of Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the 24th century. The Star Trek film franchise is at something of a crossroads. After the original film universe ended with 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis, the franchise would take a few years off before coming back with J.J. Abrams' 2009 revival, a quasi-reboot starring Chris Pine as a young Captain James T. Kirk.
The Abrams films very cleverly established themselves as part of Star Trek canon, but in an alternate reality known as the Kelvin timeline. This allowed the producers to pick and choose which stories and aspects from Star Trek: The Original Series they wanted to utilize, while essentially scrambling them up into something new, like Captain Christopher Pike serving as a mentor to young Kirk, or the romance between Spock and Uhura.
The future of the Kelvin timeline films has been in question since 2016's Star Trek Beyond underperformed at the box office. Making matters worse, there have been conflicting reports about how eager Pine would be to return for a fourth film, specifically at the amount of money he's being offered. But there's an obvious way to keep the Kelvin timeline alive and vital - shift it to the era of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This famous spinoff takes place a century after the events of TOS, with an entirely new crew and Enterprise. The show was a mainstream hit and propelled the Star Trek franchise to new heights on both the big and small screens. It's a sort of blasphemy among hardcore fans, but the fact is The Next Generation is probably more popular than The Original Series at this point; the more modern production design and storytelling style have held up better over the years better than the 1960s archness of TOS. There's a lot more of TNG too, which ran for seven seasons as opposed to TOS's three. There's also the fact that Paramount+'s Star Trek: Picard has reignited interest in TNG with its revisitation of its characters and world.
The Kelvin version of the TOS crew was immaculately cast and are beautifully shot, but they were more often meat and potatoes action movies than thoughtful Star Trek stories. Three movies feels like a nice, complete number for that iteration of Star Trek; it's time to move forward, both in the timeline and in style. It's time to get back to TNG's mix of morality plays and ethical quandaries viewed with intellectual empathy. It would not only be tapping into an entirely different flavor of nostalgia, but it would also serve as a needed evolution for the big screen version of the franchise.