2025 Was a Turning Point for ‘Star Trek’, Whether It Knew It or Not

Star Trek has had a strong few years, and it’s on the verge of being stronger in 2026. The franchise is turning 60 and no doubt has a lot of high expectations set on how to mark that. The year will kick off with a bang with a brand-new series in the form of Starfleet Academy. And Paramount’s monumental changes this year have seen Star Trek caught in the fires of its path towards some big changes in the future—a future Paramount very much wants Trek to be a part of.

But all that forward thinking has made Trek‘s 2025, in hindsight, feel like a year of shifting change for the franchise, perhaps the herald of one not really seen since Star Trek came roaring back to life in the streaming renaissance provided by the launch of Star Trek: Discovery back in 2017. It was perhaps not helped by the fact that the Star Trek we did get this year wasn’t exactly entirely well regarded—and a light year, to boot, for a franchise that has been quite used to having multiple plates spinning at once in the last few years.

Trek‘s 2025 kicked off in unglamorous style with the release of Section 31, the movie vestige of what were once bold plans for the first Star Trek spinoff to come after Discovery revitalized the franchise. A film confused by what it wanted to be, why it was named Section 31 in the first place, and in many ways arguably why it was named Star Trek even beyond that, Section 31 marked a potential one-off for the franchise’s plans to slowly dip its feet back into the world of films, except perhaps on the scale of streaming rather than the box office. After all, at this point, Trek‘s renaissance had firmly re-established the franchise as a TV juggernaut and not the movie franchise it had struggled to become again since the launch of the 2009 Star Trek reboot.

Then there was Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Even before the third season began, something started feeling off, with Paramount’s oddly timed news to confirm that, after almost two years of waiting for the new season, the show would end after a fifth and final truncated outing (one that we learned soon after was negotiated up from four seasons and a film). And then there was the season itself: a wildly up-and-down rollercoaster of tone and quality, unlike the high regard given to its first and second seasons. Season three seemed only to be able to be defined by its inability to really define what it was saying or doing with its episodic, genre-hopping premise, an array of ideas that either didn’t spend enough time cooking or, in some cases, should never have come out of the kitchen at all.

But that was all on-screen. Off-screen, something else was lurking: the closure of Skydance’s deal to take over Paramount. Under new management, suddenly Star Trek was in a different spotlight—and not just for the murmurings and ruffled feathers around new CEO David Ellison’s desire to see Paramount move to appeal to a more conservative, middle-America audience. In the early days of the closure, Ellison namechecked Trek as a franchise Paramount was very interested in pursuing the future of, but it would perhaps not turn out to be the future the series had been on track for over the past few years.

Suddenly, Star Trek 4 was once again no more, seemingly putting an end to a saga a decade in the making. Just as suddenly, a brand-new Star Trek movie from Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves duo Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley was announced, a new project not just standalone from any prior Trek but completely standalone from any of the other long-in-the-fire Star Trek movie projects Paramount had been dabbling with pre-acquisition. And all of a sudden, Star Trek started looking like it might actually want to be a movie-first franchise for a bit again.

With Starfleet Academy currently only renewed for a second season and Strange New Worlds expected to wrap up by 2027, Star Trek‘s TV future coming out of 2025 looks smaller and more uncertain than it has been at any time in the last eight years, with no new shows announced to truly replace the recent losses of Picard, Discovery, Prodigy, and Lower Decks (a Trek comedy developed by Justin Simien and Lower Decks‘ Tawny Newsome, announced at SDCC 2024, has yet to receive an update since). And with the closure of the Skydance deal, it’s not too out there to expect some of those movie projects that had been on the back burner before are no longer part of Paramount’s future vision for Star Trek, either.

Whatever comes next for Star Trek, we can only hope it will boldly go—because its latest shake-ups put the franchise in a fascinating evolutionary process coming into a year of celebrating 60 years of its endurance in the face of change regardless.

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