Star Trek Into Darkness
At least when it comes to the principal writers, the next installment in the new Star Trek timeline will be bringing back Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to write it. The two have long worked with JJ Abrams over the years (though Abrams is not signed on for the next installment as of yet) and they’ve managed to do fairly well in mainstreaming the property, though it hasn’t worked well with a lot of fans. The pair worked on Star Trek Into Darkness along with Damon Lindelof, who will not be back for the next installment. The feature took in $450 million worldwide in the box office, which people are citing as being a failure after the 2009 release and the wait between installments, but the 2009 feature did $385 million worldwide itself, albeit on a $150 million budget compared to the $190 million budge of Star Trek Into Darkness. Still, with home video and other additional revenue streams, Paramount is pleased overall though expectations were foolishly high considering the gap.
Expectations are that a film will be ready by 2016 for the 50th anniversary, which makes a lot of sense, but there’s also the worry of mining too much of the past for such a film. Karl Urban noted this in a recent interview where he said:
“What I really believe we should do now is strive for originality. Because in Star Trek Into Darkness we took one of the most revered and loved adversaries of the Enterprise and put him in there, and did a story that had all of these wonderful nods to films from the past, and episodes from the past. I really think that what we should do from here, in my personal opinion, is strive to be original. Strive to be something different and new. You know, let’s not forget that Star Trek as envisioned was about space exploration. And it would be really wonderful to harness the spirit of that and apply it to the next film, so that we do something different than a revenge-based picture.”