Two Star Trek movies confirmed in development

After much recent rumour and confusion about what path the next Star Trek movie is taking, Paramount Pictures CEO Jim Gianopulos has cleared things up a little by confirming that there are indeed two Star Trek movies currently in development. Details remain sparse, but The Hollywood Reporter report that he made comments at CinemaCon yesterday noting that Paramount and Skydance were at work on the two films.

Does that mean both will actually get made? Who knows! Or that both will be Kelvin timeline? Also a mystery! Zachary Quinto (Spock) seemed similarly unsure when he remarked on the current possibilities when talking to the Observer recently:

I mean the only thing I can say is there’s a lot of energy around more movies. Which ones are going to happen, which ones might happen first? I can’t really say, I don’t know honestly. I know there are lots of conversations being had about it. I know there are plans afoot to do at least one if not more movies.

I know Paramount, under their new administration, is eager to keep the franchise going. I feel like as soon as we go reconvene and then there’s a script that the studio believes in and a director, whether it’s Quentin or somebody else, that comes up… Hopefully, we’ll move it all forward. I’m pretty sure Quentin is doing his other project, which he wrote, so that might kind of contextualize things in terms of the chronology of how we might make more than one movie, if we make more than one movie.

What we do know is that late last year Mark L. Smith was recruited to work on the script for an idea Quentin Tarantino proposed, and that back in 2016, before Star Trek Beyond was even released, Paramount had begun work developing a story to be written by J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay which would see the return of Chris Hemsworth as George Kirk (Captain Kirk's dad). Back in January IGN asked Hemsworth what the status about that project was, and he had no idea at all, but was enthusiastic anyway:

Just the fact that he had a way of reinserting the character into the world. I can’t say too much -- there’s not even a script -- but I always thought, maybe, there was a possibility of him coming back in some way. I didn’t know how or what, but [J.J. Abrams] was pretty enthusiastic about what they had planned.

Are those two ideas still the ones in play? Another mystery! Surely our best hope is that both films, whatever they are, do make it all the way into production, and that Paramount starts to take an approach more akin do Disney's treatment of Star Wars, with more frequent and varied film releases digging into different corners of the Trekverse - Fingers crossed!