As much as most of us have long had any remaining interest in a fourth Kelvin movie long exhausted by the endless repetition of hype and failure, there does seem to be more confirmation of significant creative differences on the script that was in development in 2022.

James MacKinnon, longtime makeup designer, shared some context during an interview on his work on Picard and future ambitions. He explained that he was hired by Matt Shankman in 2022 to work on preproduction but was fired after a week when the work shut down.

“We were supposed to shoot in the middle of [2022] and it was supposed to come out the following year [2023], but I think a script rewrite went in a different direction.”

This aligns with previous comments from Zoe Saldaña that creative issues around the script were a factor in the movie not going ahead.