Eddie Murphy's Scrapped Star Trek IV Sounds Absolutely Awful

Eddie Murphy may be a comedy genius, but all the yuks in the world wouldn't have saved his proposed "Star Trek" movie. During the development of 1986's "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," the powers that be decided to steer the big screen "Trek"-verse in a more humorous direction. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the then-president of Paramount, approached director and co-star Leonard Nimoy with a thought. According to Nimoy (per TrekMovie), Katzenberg said: "I have either the best idea in the world or the worst idea in the world, Eddie Murphy said he would kill to be in a 'Star Trek' movie."

Screenwriters Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes were tasked with creating a character for Murphy. They decided to make him a teacher at Berkeley. "Eddie Murphy was going to play a college professor who taught English, but a professor who we probably all had in the '60s or '70s, who's a little bit wacky and believes in extraterrestrials," Meerson told Woman's World. The idea was that the Enterprise would pick up the whale noises that Murphy's character routinely played during his classes and make contact. This was dropped after the first draft, but the general idea remained the same — Murphy's character would try to convince everyone that aliens exist after seeing some beam directly into his classroom.

In spite of everyone's best intentions, this idea sounds pretty ridiculous. One of the best things about the "Star Trek" franchise is that it's never been afraid to be tongue in cheek, but Murphy's alien-obsessed professor had the potential to wreck the delicate balance between comedy, sentiment, and science fiction that makes "Star Trek IV" work so well. The proposed plotline with Murphy sounds like something that belongs in a wacky sci-fi sitcom like "My Favorite Martian" or "Mork & Mindy," not a "Star Trek" film.

According to "The Voyage Home" producer Harve Bennett (who first took the reins for 1982's "The Wrath of Khan" and went on to produce four "Star Trek" films in total), his first meeting with Eddie Murphy was a "little bizarre." He told Woman's World that Murphy and his entourage all showed up in black leather outfits. "We told Eddie this story, he thought about it for a while and he said, 'It's good. Let me see a script,' and walked out. We sat there and thought, 'Would it be terrific to have Eddie in this movie?'"

Behind the scenes, the studio was starting to get cold feet. However, at this point, it was pretty much out of their hands. "Eddie had a certain amount of clout and he said that he hadn't decided whether he wanted to do it or not and so much of the development of the story was with the very distinct possibility that Eddie Murphy was in it," Bennett explained. Luckily for them — and for "Star Trek" fans everywhere – Murphy ended up rejecting the part in favor of "The Golden Child," which came out the same year.

With Eddie Murphy out, the script for "The Voyage Home" was rewritten by Bennett and Nicholas Meyer, with some of the professor character's qualities given to Catherine Hicks' Dr. Gillian Taylor. The film was lauded by critics and it did well at the box office, raking in $133 million worldwide from a budget of $24 million. "The Golden Child" wasn't quite as successful, making just shy of $80 million from a similar budget. The majority of critics panned the dark fantasy action comedy — it has a 22% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Eddie Murphy, who is a self-described Trekkie, would later lament turning down the chance to appear in a "Star Trek" movie. Speaking to veteran entertainment journalist Ed Gross in 2023, he admitted that opting to appear in "The Golden Child" instead of "The Voyage Home" was a mistake. "In retrospect, I think I might have been better off doing 'Star Trek IV,'" he said. So why did Murphy opt to make "The Golden Child" instead? Well, it apparently came down to his character being human — and a familiar human, at that.

During the promotion of his 2008 sci-fi comedy film "Meet Dave," Murphy brought up the fact that he almost appeared in "The Voyage Home." He stated that the character the screenwriters came up with was too similar to Axel Foley from "Beverly Hills Cop," which ultimately pushed him toward "The Golden Child." During a 2023 appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live," Murphy said: "I was going to be the one that they met when they got to San Francisco, and I was like, 'No, I want to go and beam up and be on the ship,' so I didn't do it," Murphy said. He then added, "They had me like talking jive to Spock."

Murphy apparently had his heart set on playing a Vulcan, which came as news to Leonard Nimoy. When TrekMovie told the Spock actor this during a 2008 interview, he said that they only ever envisioned Murphy playing the professor character. "I guess he was right in that it was a character that he had played before in some way," Nimoy said. "I had no idea that he was looking to play an entirely different kind of alien or Vulcan. We still admire Eddie Murphy and I hope he still admires us."