Background During production on the
first season of
Star Trek: Discovery, special guest star
Michelle Yeoh suggested to executive producer
Alex Kurtzman that they make a spin-off series featuring her character
Philippa Georgiou. Yeoh made the suggestion because she loved playing the character, and because she wanted to be a role model for young Asian women. Kurtzman was enthusiastic about the idea, but was unsure if a spin-off would be feasible since
Discovery had not yet been released. After Yeoh's performance received positive responses, the writers of
Discovery began exploring the
black ops division
Section 31 as part of her storyline in the
second season. That led to further discussions about a potential spin-off series. In June 2018, after becoming sole
showrunner of
Discovery, Kurtzman signed a five-year overall deal with
CBS Television Studios to expand the
Star Trek franchise beyond
Discovery to several new series, miniseries, and animated series. Yeoh was in talks to star in a spin-off series by November, which was expected to follow her character's Section 31 storyline. The streaming service
CBS All Access confirmed it was moving ahead with development on the spin-off in January 2019, with
Discovery writers Bo Yeon Kim and Erika Lippoldt set as writers and showrunners. Kurtzman said the project was intended to be an ongoing series rather than a limited miniseries, and added that Kim and Lippoldt had begun writing while still working on the second season of
Discovery. It was his hope that the new series would be ready to begin production once the
third season of
Discovery was completed. In March 2019, CBS Television Studios president David Stapf said the spin-off would be produced in
Toronto, Canada, like
Discovery, but it was "a good couple of years away", with Kurtzman expecting it to be released in 2021 or 2022. Yeoh confirmed that she was working on the series the next month. Kurtzman said
Discovery writers were aware that their portrayal of Section 31 was inconsistent with the organization's introduction in the series
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the spin-off would show its evolution from their version to its original depiction, specifically why it becomes an "underground organization". Kurtzman cited
Killing Eve and the
Mission: Impossible franchise as influences and said Georgiou would be "a protagonist who's entirely unreliable. At the end of the day, she's going to do the right thing, but in the exact wrong way." In July,
Shazad Latif indicated that he could be reprising his
Discovery role of Ash Tyler in the spin-off. A
writers' room had been established by the end of November, and Kurtzman said the completed pilot script "occupies an area of the
Trek universe that's never really been explored geographically. It has a new mythology to it". He also compared the series to the film
Unforgiven (1992). By the end of January 2020, the series was set to be filmed from May to November 2020, in the newly opened CBS Stages Canada in
Mississauga, near Toronto. In February 2020, the series was reportedly renewed for a second season to allow the first two seasons to be filmed
back-to-back. Production on the third season of
Discovery was completed that month, but filming on the spin-off was delayed by Yeoh's commitment to the film
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) which was set to be filmed from January to May. Plans to instead begin filming the spin-off series in May were soon delayed by the
COVID-19 pandemic, with Kurtzman later stating that their plans for the series had been "thrown completely into whack" by the pandemic. By August 2020, Kim and Lippoldt were working with
Discovery writer
Craig Sweeny to build the series; Sweeny previously served as showrunner on the Kurtzman-produced series
Limitless. Kurtzman said the writers had been able to "get quite ahead in scripts" due to the production delays. A month later, frequent
Star Trek director
Jonathan Frakes said Kim and Lippoldt were optimistic that the series would be made despite work starting on a different
Discovery spin-off series,
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Frakes had asked to direct
Section 31 pilot episode but said a female director would likely be hired since the series was primarily a "woman's story". In March 2021,
ViacomCBS announced that CBS All Access would be expanded and rebranded as
Paramount+. The third season of
Discovery writes out Georgiou in the two-part episode "
Terra Firma", released in December 2020, which was co-written by Kim and Lipoldt. They said the character's storyline for the season was developed with "a lot of care", and it ends with her being transported to an unknown place and time where the spin-off is set. Yeoh said she hoped work on the spin-off could continue "very soon". In February 2021, Kurtzman said there was still conversations taking place about making the series, and he was optimistic about it eventually happening due to the already completed scripts. However, he said the spin-off was unlikely to be added to Paramount+'s slate of
Star Trek Universe series until one of the existing five series came to an end. In February 2022, Kurtzman said the
Section 31 spin-off was still in development and his team were planning
Star Trek series that would be released two or three years later. The series was expected to get a pickup from Paramount+ soon after. In May, Kurtzman said he and his team were focusing on developing
Section 31 and
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy as the next two
Star Trek series. No further announcements had been made by January 2023, when
Paramount Streaming's chief programming officer Tanya Giles said the spin-off was still in development.
Development In March 2023, after revealing that
Discovery would be ending with its
fifth season, Kurtzman expressed interest in making more limited event series and television films for the
Star Trek franchise rather than just traditional ongoing television series. He reiterated that the project was still in development. A month later, Paramount+ announced that
Star Trek: Section 31 was moving forward as a streaming "event film" instead of a series. Yeoh was attached to reprise her role in the film, which was written by Sweeny and set to be directed by
Discovery executive producer
Olatunde Osunsanmi. The film was described as "
Mission: Impossible meets
Guardians of the Galaxy". Kurtzman had begun converting the project from a series to a film in mid-2022, after realizing that Yeoh could win an
Academy Award for her role in the film
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and her schedule would likely get much busier. He and other executives had already been interested in expanding the franchise to event projects and were concerned about oversaturating the franchise with too many ongoing television series. Production was initially expected to begin in late 2023, reportedly in October, before it was delayed by the
2023 Hollywood labor disputes. In May 2023, Latif said he had not heard if he would be involved in the film but expressed interest in reprising his role. In mid-October, after the
2023 Writers Guild of America strike ended, Kurtzman said work on the film was underway again. He announced the start of filming in January 2024, when additional cast members were revealed:
Omari Hardwick,
Kacey Rohl,
Sam Richardson, Sven Ruygrok,
Robert Kazinsky,
Humberly González, and
James Hiroyuki Liao. Rohl plays a young version of Rachel Garrett, who was portrayed by
Tricia O'Neil in the
Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "
Yesterday's Enterprise" where she is the captain of the
USS Enterprise-C. Sweeny said viewers would not need to recognize Garrett to enjoy the film as he wanted a "low barrier of entry" for new fans. Osunsanmi said the film's supporting characters had changed from when the project was planned to be a television series, and those rewrites were why Latif was no longer reprising his role. Latif's involvement in the series would have been related to the
Temporal Wars from
Star Trek: Enterprise.
Joe Pingue,
Miku Martineau, and Augusto Bitter were also cast in the film. The film is set in the franchise's "lost era" between the
Star Trek: The Original Series films and the series
Star Trek: The Next Generation. Osunsanmi said this setting gave them some freedom, but they still had to ensure that the technology and other aspects of the setting were appropriate for the time period. Discussing concerns about making a film focused on Section 31, Sweeny acknowledged that the idea was "almost antagonistic to some of the values of
Star Trek" but felt there was room in
Star Trek creator
Gene Roddenberry's vision for people who do not want to work together on the bridge of a
Starfleet ship. Osunsanmi said they "worked really hard to make sure we kept up the ideals of optimism and kept up the ideals of what do we want our society to be in the future". He compared Section 31 to the
CIA and secretive government agencies focused on
UFOs.
Filming Filming began at
Pinewood Toronto Studios in Toronto, Canada, on January 29, 2024, under the
working title Dovercourt. Pinewood Toronto Studios is where
Discovery was produced, and sets from that series were repurposed for the film. Filming for
Section 31 took place concurrently with production on the
third season of
Strange New Worlds at nearby CBS Stages Canada, and the two productions shared use of visual effects company
Pixomondo's Toronto
video wall stage for virtual production. Glen Keenan returned from
Discovery and
Strange New Worlds as cinematographer for the film. Osunsanmi said he pushed the crew harder than he would when directing an episode of a television series because the whole project was over within a few months rather than the extended "marathon" schedule of a season of television. He said "we got to push everything to the extreme... emotion, performances, action, you name it". Osunsanmi was also able to breakdown the entire script and map out how he wanted to "tie everything together by the end". He chose to reconsider his creative and visual approach so it would be "new and fresh" rather than approaching the film in the same way that he had episodes of
Discovery. He noted that Kurtzman wanted each
Star Trek project to have its own "flavor". Production on
Section 31 was expected to take six weeks, ending on March 13; Kazinsky announced the end of filming on March 21.
Post-production The final cut of the film was locked by mid-October 2024, with a runtime of just under two hours.
Additional dialogue recording (ADR), visual effects, and
color grading were underway at that time. ==Music==