It’s no secret that coronavirus has played havoc with the TV and film industries, with no shortage of release date delays and productions being put on hold. So, where does a global pandemic leave the Star Trek Universe? It’s not all bad news, according to showrunner Alex Kurtzman.
“Things are just starting to shoot again,” Kurtzman tells SFX. “We would have been in production already on Picard, but we couldn’t be because of Covid. It’s pushed our Discovery and Strange New Worlds dates just a little bit, but I think we’re actually planning on staying on track for those. By the time they shoot, we will have innovated with a couple shows, and we will know where we are. And we will be a little bit more down with a process.
“So I’m hopeful... it’s a very systematised, militarised operation now, that’s really rigorously being constructed around making sure that everybody is safe and that the sets function in pods so that if one person is sick, it does not necessarily infect the entire group.”
Kurtzman also revealed that there’s no announced date as yet for the Pike/Spock spin-off, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, but things are looking good for the new show already.
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“The silver linings are that Akiva [Goldsman] and Henry [Alonso Myers] are ready to show up and able to really get ahead with scripts,” he says. “By the time we go back into production, we will have a lot of scripts ready to go, which is not usually how it is for us. We’re always running ahead of the freight train that is production and trying not to get flattened, but this time we actually have some advanced warning with a lot of prep time.”
Things have been a little luckier over on the animated side of the Star Trek Universe, and while Kurtzman says there’s “quite a lot of animation left to do”, the team on Lower Decks and Prodigy, the new Nickelodeon series, have been working non-stop.
And while we wait, we’ve got Star Trek: Discovery season 3 to see us through – it’s streaming on UK Netflix in the UK from October 16 and on CBS All Access in the US. Read our full interview with the team behind the show in the new issue of SFX – available now.
