BREAKING: Nicholas Meyer Working on Khan Limited TV Series

Writer-director Nicholas Meyer became a Star Trek icon in 1982 when he directed (and for the most part wrote) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the low-budget follow-up to the first Star Trek movie from 1979, which was a box office hit but which cost so much to make that Paramount elected to follow it up with a smaller picture produced by their television division.

Khan had everything 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture lacked: action, acting histrionics, and the warm and often amusing character interplay between Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and McCoy (Deforest Kelley). The sequel earned about what the first movie had, on approximately a quarter of its budget, setting the template for further Star Trek movies. Meyer returned to co-write the most popular entry in the series, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and he directed and co-wrote the final movie featuring the original series cast, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

More recently, Meyer has been involved as a writer on the new Star Trek series for CBS All Access, Star Trek Discovery. But according to two separate sources, Meyer is moving on from that position for a new Star Trek project, something he has hinted at in recent interviews. According to the sources, Meyer’s new project takes him back to Khan Noonien Singh, the “genetically superior” villain played by Ricardo Montalban in the original series episode “Space Seed” and in The Wrath of Khan, and by Benedict Cumberbatch in the J.J. Abrams-helmed Star Trek Into Darkness. Meyer will reportedly be developing a prequel miniseries, or limited series that would take place on Ceti Alpha V and chronicle Khan and his followers struggling to survive in the years between when Kirk dropped him off on the planet at the end of “Space Seed” and when the crew of the U.S.S. Reliant finds them early in The Wrath of Khan.