Forty years after Kirk and Spock time-jumped to 1986 San Francisco to rescue two humpback whales, Paramount Pictures is sending Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home back to the big screen. The run starts September 4, 2026, and it’s a UK cinemas exclusive, according to SciFiNow and SuperHeroHype. A new commemorative poster from illustrator Matt Ferguson accompanies the release, timed to a bigger number: 2026 also marks 60 years since the original Star Trek series premiered on NBC, per SciFiNow. It’s the one Trek movie that ditched space battles for a rescue mission, and for more than two decades it was quietly the biggest box-office hit the franchise ever produced.

A Sequel Without a Villain

The Voyage Home broke its own franchise’s formula on purpose. Instead of a new enemy to outgun, Kirk and his crew are the ones out of their depth, stealing a Klingon Bird-of-Prey and slingshotting around the sun to fetch two humpback whales from 1986, because a mysterious probe threatening Earth in the 23rd century turns out to be trying to talk to a species humanity had already hunted to extinction. Landing in San Francisco, the crew fumbles through what AOL’s coverage of the re-release describes as “punk rock, pizza and exact-change buses” — a fish-out-of-water comedy stapled onto a Cold War-era space franchise, with an actual endangered-species message at its core.

Leonard Nimoy, back in the director’s chair, is credited across every outlet covering the re-release, along with the surviving core cast: William Shatner, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, and Catherine Hicks, per SuperHeroHype’s rundown of the film. Nobody gets vaporized. Nobody fires a shot. The closest thing to a villain is humanity’s own history, and that’s precisely why it played so differently from everything the franchise had done before. Even the crew’s disguise for wandering 1980s San Francisco is a joke at Starfleet’s expense: the future’s finest officers, reduced to bumming quarters for a payphone and getting scolded on a city bus.

The Movie That Out-Earned Every Star Trek Film for 23 Years

The gamble paid off in a way nobody at Paramount could have predicted. The Voyage Home opened November 26, 1986, and finished its run with $109.7 million domestically, according to Box Office Mojo’s official figures for the film — a number no other Star Trek movie touched for the rest of the 20th century. Star Trek: First Contact, Generations, and Nemesis all came and went without catching it. The record stood until J.J. Abrams’ 2009 reboot pulled in $257.7 million domestically, per Box Office Mojo’s figures for that film, more than doubling what the whale movie had made. For twenty-three years, the highest-grossing entry in a franchise built on phasers and photon torpedoes was the one where the crew’s biggest weapon was a marine biologist.

Two Birthdays, One Poster

The timing isn’t a coincidence. Star Trek the franchise turns 60 in 2026, counting from its September 1966 debut on NBC, and Paramount has been building toward Star Trek Day on September 8, according to both SciFiNow and AOL. Slotting The Voyage Home‘s 40th-anniversary re-release just days before that milestone turns one celebration into two. The new poster, illustrated by Matt Ferguson (who has also produced anniversary art for the franchise’s earlier films, per AOL’s reporting), carries the tagline “They travelled back to where 23rd century man had never gone before. To a mad, crazy, outrageous time: 1986,” a nod to the film’s own fish-out-of-water premise turned back on the audience four decades later.

The Catch: You’ll Need a Passport

American fans hoping to catch this on a local marquee should adjust expectations now. Every outlet reporting the re-release is specific that the September 4 date applies to UK cinemas only, not a wider or U.S. return: SuperHeroHype and AOL both frame it as a UK-specific booking, with no confirmed date for U.S. theaters. It’s a smaller rollout than the anniversary might suggest, closer to a regional event screening than a nationwide victory lap.

That regional limit doesn’t shrink what the anniversary is actually marking, though. Studios lean on nostalgia re-releases constantly now, usually for the loudest, most explosive title in a catalog, the one built for an IMAX screen and a trailer full of explosions. Trek picked the opposite one to send back to theaters. It’s the movie where the crew saves the future by protecting something from the past, where diplomacy means learning to speak whale instead of firing first, and the biggest spectacle on screen is two whales breaching in San Francisco Bay. Forty years on, that’s still the harder trick to pull off.