Quentin Tarantino might be making a Star Trek movie

Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is known for his love of genre movies, and now it looks like a Star Trek film may be in his future. Deadline is reporting that Tarantino is working with producer J.J. Abrams on his own original idea for a Trek film, which he could potentially direct.

According to the report, Tarantino pitched his idea to Abrams, and the current plan is for the pair to assemble a writer’s room of screenwriters who will then develop the concept into a screenplay. Handing off writing duties would appear to be a good fit for both filmmakers given their current schedules: Tarantino is about to start shooting his next movie, a drama set in Los Angeles around the time of the Charles Manson murders, while Abrams is diving into Star Wars: Episode IX.

Tackling an intellectual property like Star Trek would be a marked shift for Tarantino. The writer-director has stayed away from film franchises throughout his career, focusing instead on developing his own idiosyncratic material. However, he has served as a for-hire director in television before, helming episodes of both ER and CSI.

Sprawling film franchises have become so omnipresent in Hollywood that there’s often a sense of dismay expressed when young, upcoming filmmakers with unique voices are thrown into the blockbuster system. The argument is that the aesthetic and tone of a franchise like Marvel or Star Wars is so overpowering that it would drown out, and perhaps hamper the development of, a given filmmaker’s individualistic voice. In the case of Tarantino, however, it’s hard to think of a writer-director with more of a specific, honed sensibility. The excitement about this particular project wouldn’t be the impact that Trek would have on Tarantino; it’s what Tarantino would have on Trek.