Despite Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3, 2025 was a bumpy year for Star Trek as fans continue to cope with several harsh realities about our favorite sci-fi franchise. Star Trek is nearly 60 years old and has seen several stages of ‘deaths’ followed by glorious rebirths.
2025 has been somewhere in between. The year began with promise, despite a vastly reduced output of new content on Paramount+. Star Trek only had one movie, Star Trek: Section 31, and one season of TV, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3, in 2025.
Neither Star Trek: Section 31 nor Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 lived up to everything fans hoped for. However, 2026 seems brighter. Star Trek is fueled by optimism, and there are signs that Star Trek‘s 60th anniversary year could reinvigorate the franchise.
New York Comic Con in October will offer a glimpse of Star Trek‘s 60th year celebrations by hyping up Star Trek: Starfleet Academy season 1 and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4.
In the meantime, however, Star Trek fans keep on enduring the following harsh realities as 2025 winds down.
Star Trek’s New Shows Don’t Have Enough Episodes
Perhaps the most common and frequent lament from Star Trek fans is that there simply is not enough new Star Trek on television. Paramount+ mandates a 10-episode season for its streaming Star Trek series, which is out of the creators’ hands.
10 episodes for series like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds isn’t enough, considering the show’s massive cast and episodic format, which would lend itself to a more ample exploration of characters and alien planets with classic Star Trek’s 22-26 episode structure.
Star Trek: Discovery season 1 was 15 episodes, season 2 was 14, and season 3 was 13 hours when the series was co-financed by Netflix internationally. Once Star Trek: Discovery shifted exclusively to Paramount+, seasons 4 and 5 were the usual 10 episodes.
Unfortunately, Paramount+ shows no indication of increasing Star Trek‘s 10-episode-per-season format. Sadly, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 5 will be the first Star Trek season to clock in at only 6 episodes for its final run on Paramount+.
Paramount+ Canceled Almost Every New Star Trek Show
2024’s disheartening Star Trek cancellations rolled over into 2025. Although three Star Trek series aired in 2024 – Star Trek: Discovery season 5, Star Trek: Prodigy season 2, and Star Trek: Lower Decks season 5 – it also ended up being the final season of all three shows.
Star Trek: Discovery was originally expected to run for seven seasons like the 1990s Star Trek shows executive-produced by Rick Berman, but Paramount+ unexpectedly canceled Star Trek: Discovery, making season 5 its final season before granting Disco an extended series finale.
Star Trek: Prodigy was canceled by and purged from Paramount+ in 2023 before a passionate fan campaign brought Netflix to the rescue.
Although Star Trek: Prodigy seasons 1 and 2, totaling 40 half-hour episodes, streamed on Netflix, the world’s biggest streaming service didn’t order more episodes, which effectively ended the beloved animated series.
Star Trek: Prodigy‘s Netflix rights expire at the end of 2025, sending the series into streaming limbo.
Star Trek: Lower Decks also ended with season 5, despite the show being relatively inexpensive to produce and having the potential to run for many more years. Plus, Star Trek: Lower Decks starred Jack Quaid, a bona fide movie star who also happens to love Star Trek.
Compared to the glorious year of 2022, when five Star Trek series streamed a new episode on Paramount+ every Thursday for almost the entire year, 2025 seemed destitute despite Star Trek: Section 31 and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3.
10 Year Wait (And Counting) For New Star Trek Movies
2025 marked year nine without any new Star Trek theatrical movies. Despite repeated promises that Star Trek 4, the fourth outing of J.J. Abrams’ Starship Enterprise crew, would happen, and the cast’s publicly stated desire to return, no movie has materialized.
In 2024, Paramount announced a Star Trek Origins prequel movie directed by Toby Haynes would hit theaters in 2025 or 2026. The former didn’t happen and there’s no chance of this film arriving in theaters for Star Trek‘s 60th anniversary in 2026, either.
Skydance Media’s acquisition of Paramount Global came with promises to make Star Trek – and Star Trek movies – a priority for the studio. Before the merger, X-Men producer Simon Kinberg was hired as the czar overseeing new Star Trek movies.
Perhaps 2026 will finally see an announcement for a Star Trek movie that will actually then go into production and be released in theaters, but as 2025 comes to a close, Star Trek fans have ample reason to remain doubtful.
Star Trek Still Can’t Get Primetime Emmys Recognition
Star Wars: Andor season 2 received multiple Primetime Emmy Award nominations in 2025 and won the prize for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series. This is a feat no version of Star Trek has accomplished, despite producing over 900 episodes of quality television for almost 60 years.
Star Trek: The Next Generation season 7 received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Drama Series in 1994. Both seasons of Star Wars: Andor also received nominations for Outstanding Drama Series.
An Emmy campaign for the critically lauded Star Trek: Picard season 3 in 2023 disappointingly didn’t garner arguably the best season of Paramount+’s Star Trek franchise a coveted Primetime Emmy nomination.
Star Trek has won many technical and Creative Arts Emmy Awards, yet the most prestigious prizes in television continue to elude even the best offerings from Star Trek on Paramount+.
Star Trek: Section 31 Was An Epic Disappointment
The lack of new Star Trek theatrical movies temporarily stung less thanks to the advent of made-for-streaming Star Trek movies on Paramount+, which potentially offered new possibilities.
Unfortunately, the first and only Star Trek streaming movie, Star Trek: Section 31, was considered a dud by most Star Trek fans upon its premiere in January 2025.
A generic sci-fi actioner with merely a Star Trek sheen, Section 31 was a disappointing comeback for Academy Award-winner Michelle Yeoh as Emperor Philippa Georgiou.
Although Star Trek: Section 31‘s streaming ratings were respectable, Paramount Skydance’s new regime announced it has no interest in more Star Trek streaming movies, effectively turning Section 31 into a strange outlier in the franchise.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Was Problematic After A 2-Year Wait
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 was the one great hope for Star Trek fans in 2025, as it was already the most popular live-action Star Trek on Paramount+ show with Trekkies and mainstream audiences.
Due to the combined WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 was delayed for two years. Premiering in June 2025, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 presented its uncompromising vision of exploring different types of genres.
By the back half of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3, however, Star Trek fans started to rebel, casting blame like ‘too much comedy’ and ‘not enough Star Trek‘ at season 3’s dedication to being as entertaining as possible.
While it’s hard to argue against Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 having problems, it also delivered crowd-pleasing episodes like “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” and “Terrarium.” Still, many Star Trek fans felt season 3 wasn’t worth the two-year wait.
Star Trek’s Future Is Hopeful, But Unclear
Star Trek fans in 2025 can only look ahead with hope towards 2026 and Star Trek‘s 60th anniversary, which will be marked by the premiere of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy season 1 and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s well-received teaser trailer at San Diego Comic-Con delivered a first look that offered enough tantalizing sights to offset the fact that it’s partly a sequel to the less popular Star Trek: Discovery.
Yet Star Trek: Starfleet Academy will arrive with a lot of positives, like a hot young cast led by Academy Award-winner Holly Hunter and Academy Award-nominee Paul Giamatti, as well as the live-action return of Robert Picardo as The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 looks to move past season 3’s missteps and deliver more character-driven, episodic Star Trek that harkens back to the exploratory spirit of Star Trek: The Original Series, which Strange New Worlds will link up to when it ends in season 5.
Star Trek Day in September 2025 announced many new partnerships to ring in Star Trek‘s 60th year in 2026, including a float at the Rose Bowl Parade and a fan-pleasing partnership with LEGO.
However, the real hope for Star Trek fans lies in what Paramount Global could announce in 2026, such as possible new Star Trek shows or new movies. Whether that will come with a new creative vision after 10 years of stewardship by Alex Kurtzman and Secret Hideout is anyone’s guess.
2025 lacked concrete promises for the future of Star Trek, but 2026 looks to truly begin Paramount Skydance’s vision of what’s next for the final frontier.
Star Trek: Legacy Probably Won’t Happen (The Way Fans Hoped For)
2025 marked two years of fans demanding Star Trek: Legacy, the proposed spinoff set up by the ending of Star Trek: Picard season 3, and getting nothing in return but disappointment.
In 2025, Star Trek: Picard season 3’s showrunner and Star Trek: Legacy’s mastermind, Terry Matalas, executive-produced and filmed Vision Quest for Marvel Studios. With an increasingly full dance card of projects, the window for Matalas returning to Star Trek is rapidly closing.
Yet Star Trek: Legacy remains the most requested and hoped for new Star Trek project, and its prospective cast, like Jeri Ryan, Michelle Hurd, and Ed Speleers, continue to be vocal about their desire to lead the new voyages of the USS Enterprise-G.
There’s hope that Paramount Skydance’s new leadership could see the potential of Star Trek: Legacy and greenlight it, at last. Whether Star Trek: Legacy could be an ongoing TV series, or a theatrical movie, or whether it would have Terry Matalas overseeing it creatively, remains unknown.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds are only assured two more seasons on Paramount+, and both could be over by 2027. What happens after that will hopefully be a new renaissance for Star Trek that will leave the sturm und drang of Star Trek fans in 2025 behind for good.
- Release Date
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May 5, 2022
- Network
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Paramount+
- Showrunner
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Henry Alonso Myers, Akiva Goldsman
