Despite how weird it may initially seem, a Quentin Tarantino Star Trek movie is officially happening. Tarantino announced last year  that he would be cutting his oeuvre off at ten films – with the 1969/Manson family project being his second to last, that would make the Star Trek film his final effort.

He’s joining the Star Trek franchise via an idea he pitched to J.J. Abrams. Tarantino stipulated to Abrams that he wanted to do the project, but on one condition – that he got to make the movie R-rated, making it the first R-rated film in Star Trek history. Now, according to Deadline, Abrams and Paramount have assembled a writers room to hash out Tarantino’s idea – he met with Mark L. Smith (The Revenant), Lindsey Beer (Godzilla vs Kong) and Drew Pearce (Iron Man 3) to talk about ideas for the script, and reportedly Mark L. Smith is in the forefront to write it.

There are a ton of questions still to be answered about both this project and his other as-yet-unnamed film. Will it still really be his last? What will an R-rated Star Trek look like? Why, when Tarantino has always written his own films, is he hiring a writer for the screenplay? To what degree will it involve the storylines/cast/etc of the previous Abrams Star Trek films? And...most importantly...why is he doing this?