{"id":844411,"date":"2026-09-11T18:40:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T18:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/844411\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T18:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T18:40:10","slug":"star-trek-60th-anniversary-interview-about-franchise-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/844411\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Star Trek’ 60th Anniversary Interview About Franchise Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tTime is relative, especially for Akiva Goldsman<\/a>. One minute he\u2019s a kid playing with toy phasers and zipping around the galaxy on an imaginary starship. The next he\u2019s a grown-up Hollywood producer who\u2019s \u2014 still playing with toy phasers and zipping around the galaxy on an imaginary starship.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Star Trek<\/a> passes its 60th anniversary, Goldsman, 64, is nearing the end of his own five-year mission as co-creator of Strange New Worlds, the Paramount+ prequel that focuses on the adventures of Captain Christopher Pike, the intrepid space explorer who, along with his pointy-eared sidekick Mr. Spock and several other familiar Federation officers, zooms through the cosmos on the USS Enterprise in the years just before Captain James T. Kirk squeezed into the command chair in the original 1966-69 series.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo commemorate the franchise\u2019s sexagenary, The Hollywood Reporter sat down with the superfan-turned-uber-producer to talk about the show he\u2019s loved since childhood, why Star Trek has survived for six decades, whether another generation of fans is coming, and why, despite everything going on in the world right now, he still believes humanity has a shot at making it to the 23rd century.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhotographed by Rick Wenner<\/p>\n

\n\tLet\u2019s start with the obvious question on Star Trek\u2019s 60th anniversary. Why has this thing lasted so long?<\/p>\n

\n\tI think Star Trek reflects the world as we wish it was. The promise of a bright future. And with the real-world future looking scarier every day, it takes a lot of will to hold onto optimism. Articulating a sci-fi vision of a world where we actually do\u00a0solve problems \u2014 that\u2019s as important today as it was in 1966.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThose original Star Trek years \u2014 1966 to 1969 \u2014 they were in some ways as tumultuous as 2026. Is there something about Star Trek that actually works better when the real world looks particularly bleak?<\/p>\n

\n\tAs far as inflection points in history go, 1968 kind of takes the cake, right? It\u2019s got the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; it\u2019s got the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The world seemed dire when the original Star Trek was on the air. And the show offered something aspirational \u2014 the Star Trek ideals of interspecies collaboration and thoughtful intelligence and compassion saving the day. It\u2019s what we want to believe of humanity. But yeah, probably the darker the storm, the brighter the dawn. I just wish the storm didn\u2019t have to get quite so dark for us to have brighter visions of the future.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou were a little young to catch the original series when it first aired on NBC but like millions of other kids you geeked out to it later in reruns, right?<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen I was 12, I used to watch Star Trek on WPIX channel 11 in New York at six o\u2019clock every night. I was not what you\u2019d call a \u201ctypical\u201d kid. I did not find the world a tremendously welcoming place. But I found Star Trek. And that hour a day was everything to me. And I fantasized about Star Trek \u2014 I would play Star Trek. And then when I grew up, I got to play Star Trek as an adult. I\u2019ve been insanely, spectacularly lucky.<\/p>\n

\n\tLet\u2019s talk a bit about how you\u2019ve been playing Star Trek as an adult. Strange New Worlds is clearly a show aimed at fans of the original.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWe wanted it to be a show for people who loved the original series but also wanted it to be welcoming to newbies, with plots that didn\u2019t rely on knowledge of the original canon. You don\u2019t have to be a fan of the original to enjoy it, but if you are, there\u2019s an extra layer. It\u2019s like watching Roger Rabbit as an adult.<\/p>\n

\n\tSeason four is streaming on Paramount+ right now. You have one more final season after this. Have you finished shooting season five?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOh, it\u2019s shot; it\u2019s done; the sets are razed. We finished at the end of last summer. It\u2019s going to be a six-episode season.<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom what I can tell from season one through four, it looks like you\u2019re building a ramp right up to Sept. 8, 1966, to the first episode of the original series, when Kirk is in command of the Enterprise. Is that the game plan?<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, that was always the promise, at least for us, not knowing how long our show would last \u2014 that we would come right up to Kirk\u2019s first day on the job. And that\u2019s what we\u2019ve done. Although they tried to cancel us after season four.<\/p>\n

\n\tWere you saved by a letter-writing campaign like the original Trek?<\/p>\n

\n\tNo, we got into a conversation with Paramount. They said, \u201cMake a movie.\u201d But we were like, no, two hours would just be awful. So, we went back and forth, and to their credit we got six episodes. And that\u2019s what next year is going to be, a six-episode goodbye that hopefully resolves everything viewers have been wondering about.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou made a prequel to a show made in the 1960s about a future that we are now hurdling towards. A lot of the technology in Star Trek has sort of come true \u2014 we\u2019re all walking around with communicators and tricorders these days \u2014 but there are some things the show definitely missed. Like artificial intelligence. It had Nomad and M-5, but they look like dummies compared to Claude. How\u2019d you get around that problem?<\/p>\n

\n\tWe were lucky in that we were basically filling in a coloring book, right? There were lines we had to color within. But I like adaptation. I\u2019m sort of a serial adapter. I enjoy the parameters that come with source material, to see how far I can push them. But no, there was no AI in the original Star Trek. You can update, but only to a point.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHow long do you think this franchise can go on? The entertainment universe has changed enormously over the past 60 years. Is there even a next generation of Trekkies out there? Are kids still into it?<\/p>\n

\n\tYou know, I don\u2019t know. I have not been able to get my kids to watch. Once in while there\u2019s a thunderstorm and we\u2019re somewhere and I\u2019m like, \u2018Oh, just do it,\u2019 and my girls will watch an episode and seem to have a nice time. But they have no desire to watch it again. So, I have no evidence to suggest there is another generation coming. And yet, I deeply believe there will be, as an act of faith. Because a lot of Star Trek has always been an act of faith. We believe in a future, an aspirational future. So, yes, I believe there could be another generation of Star Trek fans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Time is relative, especially for Akiva Goldsman. One minute he\u2019s a kid playing with toy phasers and zipping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":844412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[260074,88,206,11878,32732],"class_list":["post-844411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-akiva-goldsman","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-star-trek","tag-star-trek-strange-new-worlds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/844412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}