The upcoming Star Trek movie, Section 31, has been on quite a journey over the years. Building on the groundbreaking Discovery series, development on Section 31 began in 2017, with star Michelle Yeoh entering talks to reprise her role as Emperor Philippa Georgiou a year later. The actor directs the new film, in which Georgiou confronts the sins of her past by joining a secret division of Starfleet.
It started out as a spin-off series, but since work on Section 31 began it has gone through many, many changes, which naturally caused several delays. As director Olatunde Osunsanmi says in the new issue of SFX magazine, which features the film on the cover and hits newsstands on December 31, it's been a long journey and the result is now billed as the first “event film television” of the franchise.
In fact, the modifications have been so significant that the final result is completely different from the original tone of the spin-off pilot episode, with everything changing except the names of two characters.
As Osunsanmi explains: “I would say that the only two things that are the same from the pilot of the original series to the movie we have now is that there is a character called Alok and Philippa Georgiou. It has been changed so much that two stories are completely unrecognizable, and Craig Sweeny, the writer, has been in the middle of it. [for] the whole process.”
Osunsanmi then details the extent of the changes, adding that they went through about seven different versions of what Section 31 would be. The filmmaker adds: “He is [Sweeny] I've been in a position to have written, I think, seven different versions of this. When I say seven different iterations, the first iteration was six episodes from the first season of Section 31. The second iteration was another five episodes of Section 31 that were completely different from the previous iteration. Then the fourth, fifth and sixth were various pilots that were sketches, then we had the movie, and the movie itself went through a couple of iterations.”
Naturally, all of the above led to raised eyebrows from both fans and those working on the project, concerned about the development of Section 31. However, Osunsanmi is keen to emphasize that he believes the end result is totally worth the difficult journey: ” I think where we ended up was wonderful, because we would never have gotten here if it weren't for that journey. Sometimes you just have to take the journey to get to the place you get to.”
We'll soon find out for ourselves if the long wait was worth it when Section 31 hits the Paramount Plus streaming service.
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