A big story broke today for fans of Star Trek on the silver screen. Writer and producer Kalinda Vazquez will take the helm for the newest addition to the “Kelvin” series of Trek films. Like the previous three — Star Trek (2009), Into Darkness, and Beyond — it will be produced by J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions. First, this is terrific news for anyone who’d like to see Trek back at the movie theaters. Still, it also forces one to ask — who exactly is Kalinda Vazquez?
It turns out that Ms. Vazquez has some pretty serious geek cred, as she’s been writing comic books for Marvel and involved as a consulting producer on Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery. She is a big fan of Trek, and apparently, her parents were too, since they named her after a TOS character. According to Variety, Vazquez was named after a character in the TOS episode “By Any Other Name.”
Her Star Trek writing credits include “Terra Firma, Part 2” and the Short Treks episode, “Ask Not.”
Vazquez is the daughter of Colombian and Puerto Rican parents, and she started as a writer’s assistant on the FOX show Prison Break. She’s now a recognized industry veteran who has produced of many shows, including Fear of the Walking Dead, Once Upon a Time, Marvel’s Runaways, and Nikita.
She’s also working on a new project for HBO with Game of Thrones scribe George R.R. Martin. The show will be based on the book Roadmarks, which was written by the late Roger Zelazny.
Her work with Marvel is on the title America Chavez, a Latina superhero who was known as Ms. America.
“America will definitely be platformed to play a large role in what is to come in the Marvel Universe after this five-issue run as well,” Vazquez told Marvel in a recent interview.
The Cast Is Ready
All of the stars from the first three Kelvin films have expressed that they’d like to return at one point or another.
Zachary Quinto (Spock) told MovieWeb that the cast “talk about it all the time as the crew of the Enterprise.”
“We’re all incredibly close friends in real life, and I think all of us would welcome the opportunity to go back and keep telling those stories,” he said.
In 2018, John Cho (Sulu) told Cinema Blend that he’d “rather not know.”
“The boring answer is to wait for the powers that be to decide,” said Cho. “[The cast does] write long letters to each other.”
What About Chris Pine?
The one holdout seemed to be Chris Pine (Kirk), who was slated to return for a fourth installment, which was talked about in 2016. Chris Hemsworth was penciled in to reprise his role as George Kirk, who he played in Star Trek (2009). Since that time, Hemsworth is better known as Thor the world over and would expect a Mjölnir-sized paycheck for any Trek film. Hemsworth disputes this.
That plan fell apart, and the rumors of a Quentin Tarantino Trek film started… and they have not really ever stopped. That certainly caught the attention of Pine, who said a Tarantino-helmed Trek film would be “tremendously entertaining.”
Aside from that, Pine did tell the Things Are Going Great For Me podcast that he’s up for returning as Kirk.
“I know that Paramount is coming out of having restructured a bit and kind of a major corporate restructuring,” Pine told host J. Claude Deering. “So hopefully, when all that dust settles, something concrete will come out of it, and we’ll get to work. I’d love to do it.”
Hopefully, the news of Vazquez taking over the writing duties for a fourth Trek film will not end the same way as all of the other Star Trek 4 stories have ended recently.
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