Quentin Tarantino abandoned Star Trek movie for one key reason

Quentin Tarantino didn't want his 'Star Trek' movie to be his final film.

The iconic director was close to putting his own bloody stamp on the science fiction franchise but writer Mark L. Smith admitted despite going "back and forth" with the 'Pulp Fiction' filmmaker on some ideas, things didn't work out.

He told Collider: "It was a different thing, but this was such a particular different type of story that Quentin wanted to tell with it that it fit my kind of sensibilities.

"So I wrote that, Quentin and I went back and forth, he was gonna do some stuff on it, and then he started worrying about the number, his kind of unofficial number of films.

"I remember we were talking, and he goes, 'If I can just wrap my head around the idea that Star Trek could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?'

Unfortunately, Tarantino - who has been open about his desire to retire after directing 10 films - couldn't "get across" that bump.

Smith added: "And I think that was the bump he could never get across, so the script is still sitting there on his desk.

"I know he said a lot of nice things about it. I would love for it to happen. It’s just one of those that I can't ever see happening.

"But it would be the greatest 'Star Trek' film, not for my writing, but just for what Tarantino was gonna do with it. It was just a balls-out kind of thing."

Although the writer refused to divulge any plot details about the abandoned project, he admitted the film would have had a "hard R" rating.

He explained: "But I think his vision was just to go hard. It was a hard R. It was going to be some 'Pulp Fiction' violence.

"Not a lot of the language, we saved a couple things for just special characters to kind of drop that into the 'Star Trek' world, but it was just really the edginess and the kind of that Tarantino flair, man, that he was bringing to it.

"It would have been cool."