As ‘Star Trek’ turns 60, we take the iconic sci-fi franchise to sickbay for a full health report

The date of ‘Star Wars Day’ is based on a “May the fourth be with you” pun. The date of ‘Alien Day’ (April 26), meanwhile, is inspired by an extremely tenuous link to LV-426, a moon pivotal to the first two movies.

‘Star Trek Day’, however, is based on an actual date; September 8 is the anniversary of the Original Series’ very first broadcast in 1966. This year’s birthday is more important than most, as the “Star Trek“ franchise reaches the ripe old age of 60 — Kirk and Spock’s diamond jubilee.

Birthdays are traditionally a time to take stock of past, present and future, so we’ve taken this opportunity to deliver a status report on the legendary franchise, via TV, movies and 60th anniversary celebrations — including commemorative coins and record-breaking Vulcan salutes.

Will “Star Trek” continue to live long and prosper, or would Dr McCoy deliver one of his more pessimistic assessments, Jim?

It’s time to give the veteran franchise a health check…

Television is where the voyages of the starship Enterprise began, and still feels like the franchise’s natural home. There have now been 12 separate TV shows set in the “Star Trek” continuity — 14 if you throw in “Short Treks” and pre-school YouTube series “Star Trek: Scouts” — and the final frontier has flourished on the small screen over the last decade.

Indeed, since “Discovery” first spooled up the spore drive in 2017, we’ve enjoyed the most bountiful period of “Trek” since the glory days of the ’90s, when “The Next Generation”, “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager” became appointment viewing. In many ways it’s been a masterclass of universe-building, as executive producer Alex Kurtzman (with his Secret Hideout production company) has overseen an impressively large and varied fleet of shows.

Although Disney+’s “Star Wars” TV adventures have all — with the notable exception of “Andor” — tended to be relatively uniform in tone, “Trek” has generally taken much bigger swings. “Discovery” warped off to the undiscovered country of the 32nd century, while “Lower Decks” proved that “Star Trek” and out-and-out comedy can be natural bedfellows.

“Star Trek: Picard”‘s peerless final run of episodes (arguably the best season of “Trek” ever made) skilfully mixed masterful storytelling with unashamed “TNG”-era nostalgia. “Strange New Worlds” managed to recruit the franchise’s best ensemble since the ’90s. “Prodigy” was a kids’ show grown-up fans could enjoy, too.

And for a brief period between May 2022 and April 2023, there were five active “Star Trek” shows at various stages of the production/release cycle. Little did we realize that would be a peak for the franchise and that — a little over three years later — we’d be facing the prospect of a future without any “Star Trek” TV at all.

At present, there are no “Trek” shows in production. “Strange New Worlds”‘ fifth season and “Starfleet Academy”‘s second are already in the can, but both will be their respective show’s final voyages; the sets have been dismantled, the casts have moved on to new projects.

Meanwhile, rumored spin-offs like “Picard” follow-up “Legacy” and “Strange New Worlds” sequel “Year One” seem destined to remain in the realms of Trekkie fantasy.

As “SNW” co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers told TrekMovie in August 2026, “We haven’t been told anything [about ‘Year One’]. It’s not up to us. It’s up to Paramount. We stand by and are ready to work at their discretion. We love ‘Star Trek’. We’d be happy to do it again. It is out of our hands.”

Rights holder Paramount (and its CBS subsidiary) is the unknown factor here. Skydance Media bought the studio last year, and — perhaps unsurprisingly — execs have been hesitant to invest in major new projects as they wait to learn the new regime’s direction of travel.

Skydance’s impending acquisition of Warner Bros may also be a factor — if, say, Paramount and Warner were to merge their respective streaming platforms, would “Trek” get as much prominence on HBO Max as it currently does on Paramount+?

Reports in early 2026 suggested that Kurtzman was in early negotiations to renew his production deal (the previous one expired with “Starfleet Academy”), but it’s looking increasingly unlikely he’ll return. Paramount, however, has reiterated the ongoing importance of the franchise to its bottom line.

“It’s one of the reasons why Chris [Parnell, executive vice president of Paramount+ Originals] is here as the resident number one fan of the ‘Star Trek’ franchise,” said head of Paramount+ Originals Jane Wiseman in an August 2026 interview with Deadline.

“And there’s so many people in this building, by the way, that are. It is our goal and it is our job to figure out what the next bounce of ‘Star Trek’ is. We’re talking to a lot of writers, we are leaning on [production company] CBS Studios, and it is imperative that we figure out what the next iteration is in this franchise because it’s just too important. We also are in touch with Paramount Pictures; they have a ‘Star Trek’ movie that’s in development.” (More on that below…)

That still leaves an awful lot of questions. Would a new iteration of “Trek” stick with the current 10-episode format, or go back to the longer 20+ runs of the ’90s? Has the disappointing “Section 31” killed the prospect of another “Trek” TV movie stone dead? Will Paramount see more value in its massive library of legacy “Trek” content? And how will “Trek”‘s famously progressive and liberal outlook mesh with a new-look company whose CEO, David Ellison, is close to President Trump?

Like fellow veteran genre franchises “Doctor Who” and “Star Wars”, “Star Trek” is still trying to find its place in a streaming world. There’s little doubt that it will one day return to TV, as it did after a decade away following “Enterprise”‘s 2005 cancellation. But the how and the when will have to wait for another day.

Nearly seven years elapsed between “The Rise of Skywalker” and “The Mandalorian and Grogu“, but that’s small fry next to the extended wait for a new “Star Trek” movie. It’s now 10 years (and counting) since “Star Trek Beyond” brought the Kelvin-verse adventures of alt-Kirk and alt-Spock to a close, as movies from the final frontier took a backseat to their TV counterparts.

Having made a critically acclaimed start in 2009 — director JJ Abrams ramped up the fun, effectively using “Trek” as a calling card for “The Force Awakens” — this self-contained “Trek” offshoot gradually ran out of momentum. Released four years later, “Star Trek Into Darkness” made more money than its predecessor, but felt like a tired retread of past glories. “Star Trek Beyond” (2016) made less money than either, offering an enjoyable (though hardly memorable) planet-based romp that set up the crew for more voyages… voyages that would ultimately never happen.

JD Payne and Patrick McKay (now showrunners on “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”) were hired to write a script, while SJ Clarkson (“Madame Web”) and Matt Shakman (“The Fantastic Four: First Steps“) were both attached as directors at one stage or another. One iteration would have seen timey-wimey stuff uniting two of the Hollywood Chrises, Pine and Hemsworth, bringing James T Kirk face-to-face with late dad George.

“The conceit was that through a cosmic quirk in the ‘Star Trek’ world, they were the same age,” McKay told Esquire. “It was going to be a grandfather-son space adventure — think ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ in space. We were really thrilled about it.”

“Alien: Earth” boss Noah Hawley also worked on a new story entirely separate from the Kelvin-verse, and even Quentin Tarantino pitched his take on “Trek” to the Paramount suits. The “Pulp Fiction” writer/director’s Earth-bound story would reportedly have taken its cues from “A Piece of the Action”, a 1920s-inspired episode from the Original Series.

“I think [Tarantino’s] vision was just to go hard. It was a hard R. It was going to be some ‘Pulp Fiction’ violence,” recalled “The Revenant” screenwriter Mark L Smith, who worked with Tarantino on the script (h/t Collider). “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.”

But after all those false starts, Paramount is seemingly moving ahead with another film, currently — as far as we know — the only “Trek” screen project in active development.

The as-yet-untitled movie is scripted by “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” writer/director duo Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, will feature an entirely new group of characters, and will apparently be inspired by a pair of hit movies from the ’90s and ’00s.

“Two movies we cite as [comparisons] for what we’re hoping to do are ‘Training Day’ and ‘Crimson Tide’,” Goldstein told Inverse on the recent press tour for Apple TV+’s “Mayday”.

“I think the portrayal of Starfleet and the people that work within it have always been generally idealized versions of what the future could be,” added Daley. “And while this [script] isn’t a cynical or nihilistic take on it, I think it does acknowledge that there are some bad apples in every institution that can have a strong voice and can really make an impact on that institution and everything it stands for.”

It’s hoped that the new film will launch a new franchise of its own, though it seems to be a riskier franchise relaunch option than a TV show. Although “Trek” has spawned a long-running and successful movie franchise, its films have rarely ranked among the biggest earners in Hollywood — not since 1986’s “The Voyage Home” has a “Trek” outing made it into an end-of-year top 10 in the US.

Maybe Paramount is eyeing up this “Training Day”/”Crimson Tide” format as an excuse to cast a pair of high-profile A-listers in the lead roles, following Disney/Lucasfilm’s lead in recruiting Ryan Gosling for the upcoming “Star Wars: Starfighter“. But with IP-based, space-set adventures “The Mandalorian and Grogu”, “Masters of the Universe” and “Supergirl” all having floundered in multiplexes this summer, this film could be a gamble — especially as it’ll need to appeal far beyond the traditional “Star Trek” heartlands to become a hit.

In other words, there’s little chance of a shortage of new stories across media, old (novelisations and comics) and new (Webtoons, audiobooks and videogames) — way too much to list here, in fact.

You can also get stuck into some “Star Trek” Lego, which is a pretty good way to fill that Starfleet-shaped hole.

“The days of being able to know when your show was going to be on television are maybe behind us,” “SNW” co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman lamented to SFX magazine. “God knows nothing would have been more fun than a ‘Strange New Worlds’ Christmas episode, and yet there’ll not be one.”

So we’ll have to make do with 60th anniversary side events, like the cast of medical drama “The Pitt” performing a live reading of debut “Trek” episode “The Man Trap“, birthday screenings, special episodes of game shows “The Price Is Right and “Let’s Make a Deal”, commemorative coins, and the London Science Museum’s attempt to claim the Guinness World Record for the biggest ever simultaneous Vulcan salute.

And if you want to mark the occasion yourself, there are nearly 1,000 episodes of “Star Trek” — plus 13 movies — to enjoy, most of them on Paramount+. That’s one hell of a legacy.

Live long, and prosper!