A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Will Star Trek have any new movies coming out with the original cast and not the new actors? Let me get this straight. You’re asking if Paramount will release  new  films starring the cast from the Original Series and the first six feature films instead of the cast from the Kelvin Timeline movies? The answer to that is a definitive “No.” DeForest “Dee” Kelley, who played Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, MD, died in 1999. James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, died in 2005. Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, died in 2015 Grace Lee Whitney, who played Yeoman (later Commander) Janice Rand, also died in 2015 The rest of the cast, including William Shatner, has an average age of 80+. With three of the  Enterprise  “Big Four ”  cast members dead and quite a few of the supporting cast members are either dead or no longer active in the acting business, making a new feature film with the Original Series cast is next to impossible....

How long will the current Star Trek movie franchise continue? If you’re referring to the Kelvin timeline films ( Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness,  and  Star Trek Beyond,  the “current  Star Trek  movie franchise” is - for all intents and purposes - dead and buried. There are several reasons for this, but it all boils down to this: even though the cast was pretty good, the special effects well-done, and the  initial concept  was interesting (how to tell a “prequel’ story without the usual problems that prequels have), the Kelvin Trilogy just didn’t jive with the rest of the  Star Trek  franchise. Although I liked the basic idea that Nero and his monstrous ship, the  Narada,  travel back in time to the 23rd Century and alter the destinies of James T. Kirk and Crew, the execution was, to put it simply, problematic. In the Prime Timeline (aka  Star Trek  prior to 2009), Kirk is older than most of the bridge cre...

Star Trek Beyond (2016) Written by Simon Pegg & Doug Jung Directed by Justin Lin Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban,  Simon Pegg, John Cho, Zoe Saldana, Anton Yelchin, Sofia Boutella, and Idris Elba Star Trek is perhaps one of the most successful franchises of all time, and maybe even one of the luckiest, at that. Considering that it got its start as a science fiction television series which only aired for three seasons on NBC, Gene Roddenberry's creation went on to spin off five television series (including Star Trek: The Animated Series ) and 13 feature films. Not including Paramount/CBS Studios' income from the various TV shows, Star Trek - the franchise's film element, anyway, - has earned $2,266, 473, 168 at the global box office. ($1,400,952,879 of that comes from the North American domestic market.) Thus it's not surprising that Paramount asked producer J.J. Abrams to give fans a new Star Trek film set in the alternate (or Kelvin) timel...

When director J.J. Abrams and his collaborators Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, and Roberto Orci decided to set 2009's  Star Trek  in an alternate timeline apart from  The Original Series  and its spinoffs, they did it to achieve creative freedom. Abrams and his creative team knew that simply inserting a young cast into the established Trek universe would not work.  Star Trek's  lore is nearly a half-century old, and the franchise's loyal fans wouldn't have accepted a reboot that attempted to inject the new cast into the 1966-69 William Shatner-Leonard Nimoy-DeForest Kelley troika's adventures. The effect, I think, would have been too jarring. Star Trek 's time travel-created alternate timeline thus gave Abrams & Co. the necessary flexibility to reinvigorate Gene Roddenberry's old series. As Abrams pointed out in an interview:  "The idea, now that we are in an independent timeline, allows us to use any of the ingredients from the past -...