‘Star Trek’ gets first female director in ‘Jessica Jones’ helmer S.J. Clarkson

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Paramount Pictures announced at CinemaCon today that its Star Trek series will get its first female director, S.J. Clarkson. This fourth film will star Chris Hemsworth and Zachary Quinto. Hemsworth appeared briefly as the father of Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk in the first film of the J.J. Abrams reboot, 2009’s Star Trek. Zachary Quinto, who has played Dr. Spock in all three films, joins him.

Clarkson cut her teeth on television, serving a director on dozens of shows including Jessica Jones and The Defenders for Netflix and Showtime’s Dexter. She was also the creator and writer of the ABC show Mistresses and the UK counterpart it was based on. Star Trek will be her feature film debut.

J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay wrote the screenplay. Abrams and Lindsey Weber will produce through Bad Robot Productions, with David Ellison and Dana Goldberg of Skydance Media will executive producing.

Paramount is also developing a separate Star Trek movie (to be set in a different timeline) that Quentin Tarantino would direct. The last Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond, was released in 2016, grossing $158M domestically and $342M worldwide.

This news marks one of the most visible projects for a female director in a very male-dominated arena and joins recent announcements like Ava DuVernay directing a movie based on DC Comics’ The New Gods for Warner Bros. and Cathy Yan was hired just last week to helm a pic based on DC anti-heroine Harley Quinn. Marvel is mulling getting into the game with an upcoming Black Widow movie with The Rider‘s Chloe Zhao, Mustang‘s Deniz Gamze Erguven and A United Kingdom‘s Amma Asante in the running.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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