What *Is* the Future of 'Star Trek'?

Tomorrow, Star Trek turns 60. It should be a joyous celebration of endurance for one of the most iconic sci-fi franchises around, but instead we've spent much of this anniversary year already feeling more akin to dancing on a half-filled grave.

The currently airing penultimate season of Strange New Worlds is in its final stretches, having delivered a divisive season up to this point that has kept both Star Trek storytelling and even those titular strange new worlds at arm's length in favor of increasingly charmless gimmick themes. Besides a truncated final season of SNW that will have to contend with both transitioning the series to the time of the original Trek and with winning back the critical acclaim of its early years, the only other, and currently final, piece of Star Trek on TV still to come is the sophomore season of Starfleet Academy. But even that is cast under shadow, with the looming specter of Paramount's attempts to consume Warner Bros. whole and a coordinated right-wing culture war flashpoint already having brought the series to an early and abrupt cancellation.

As the final gasps of Trek's streaming resurgence get literally sold off for parts, the franchise's purported future at the box office doesn't look particularly rosy either. The theatrical side of Star Trek spent much of that aforementioned streaming resurgence dormant, with a legion of announced movie projects—from a long-awaited continuation of the 2009 reboot universe to wild collaborations with the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Noah Hawley—all left in limbo to be quietly scrapped. Even as Paramount touts a renewed future on the big screen with a new project from the duo behind Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, that too has been caught up in the uncertainty of Paramount's merger ambitions and shrouded in uncertainty (Paramount couldn't even get us a sequel to D&D while they were at it, either).