The Long-Gestating ‘Star Trek' Section 31 Series Is Now A 'Movie Event', With Michelle Yeoh Returning

Image source: Paramount+

Ah the leverage winning an Academy Award can get you. Paramount+ today announced it has officially greenlit Star Trek: Section 31, with Michelle Yeoh returning as Emperor Phillippa Georgiou from Star Trek Discovery. However, development has taken quite a turn: Instead of being Star Trek's next series, it will now be an original movie event for the service.

It does make sense. Yeoh, who will also serve as an executive producer, may be in more demand now following her Academy Award win for Best Actress for her role in Everything Everywhere All At Once, but she certainly should get to work on the project she calls "near and dear to my heart". So much that she had pitched the Georgiou spinoff before Discovery premiered in 2017, which means over a year before the trades caught wind. And she's "beyond thrilled" to be back, she clearly loved the role ever since she took it on. But what's the movie about? Georgiou joins a secret division of Starfleet tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets and comes to a reckoning for what she did as Empress of the Terran Empire in the Mirror Universe.

Yeoh's role as Evelyn Quan Wang in Everything Everywhere All At Once brought her all sorts of success on the awards circuit culminating in that Oscar, including the SAG Award and the Golden Globe. Her previous roles include Crazy Rich Asians, the Brosnan-era Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon films, Memoirs Of A Geisha, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. She is next set to appear in the Disney+ series American Born Chinese, as well as Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, the next Hercule Poirot mystery A Haunting in Venice, the two-part adaptation of Wicked, and even the next two Avatar movies.

Craig Sweeny, previously of Limitless and Medium serves as writer and executive producer. Olatunde Osunsanmi, who comes from Showtime's The Man Who Fell to Earth (which was once destined for Paramount+) will direct and executive produce. The shepherd of this "new golden age of Star Trek" Alex Kurtzman and Aaron Baiers executive produce via Secret Hideout. The news comes as Star Trek: Picard airs its series finale Thursday, the first of the longform modern slate of Star Trek series to end, a point at which the at-the-time (in February 2021) series was stated to be likeliest to join, as Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, and Prodigy would bring the ongoing offerings to five.

With production beginning this year, Section 31 isn't going to be the next Star Trek series, but it does mean all series known to be in development are accounted for and progressing in some fashion: Starfleet Academy was greenlit at the end of March. However, this pivot into a movie marks the franchise's first film made for a streaming service, and curbs the franchise's ongoing film drought brought on by the development hell the fourth film in the J.J. Abrams-produced reboot series is going through, following the release of Star Trek Beyond in 2016. The arrival of the film may come just about when Discovery's final season run is happening, as that is set for next year as well.

Source: Star Trek