A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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 -...