A lot of developments on the Star Trek front these last few days. In a nutshell, the people who made the last two movies aren’t involved in the new film in any serious way, but the studio is determined to get the film out in time for the franchise’s 50th anniversary — which is now only a year and a half away — and so they’ve hired a director who has experience making big-budget multi-ethnic action-oriented box-office hits and reviving troubled properties. Details below.
The last time I posted anything about the Star Trek movie franchise, screenwriter Roberto Orci, who co-wrote the last two films, had just been hired to direct the third film in the rebooted universe. That was back in May. Earlier this month, however, Orci lost the gig — whether he quit or was fired is a matter of some dispute — and then, three days before Christmas, Justin Lin was hired to take his place. One day later, the studio revealed that the film now has a release date of July 8, 2016. And then, one day after that, Orci confirmed that he is no longer one of the film’s writers and, even though he is still credited as a “producer” on the film, he expressed uncertainty as to whether Star Trek fans should boycott the movie that Lin ends up making.
Orci is not the first person whose role in the Star Trek universe has been diminished if not eliminated. Director J.J. Abrams, of course, left the franchise to direct the next Star Wars movie, and Orci stopped collaborating with his longtime writing partner Alex Kurtzman earlier this year. Presumably Abrams’ production company, Bad Robot, is still involved in some way, but it remains to be seen how involved they will be. At this point, we don’t even know how drastically rewritten the script will be.
For example, before Orci’s demotion, there were reports that Leonard Nimoy was going to come back to play Spock in his ninth Star Trek film, and that William Shatner would join him as the older Kirk. This was a horrible, horrible idea — Shatner and Nimoy had already passed the baton to younger crews, in Star Trek: Generations and Abrams’ Star Trek respectively, and one of the worst things about Star Trek into Darkness was Nimoy’s cameo and everything that followed it — but it might be out the window now, along with the rest of Orci’s script. You also have to wonder if Nimoy, who has become quite chummy with Abrams and his crew, would want to stick around for the next film if it was being directed by someone entirely different.
There were also reports that Orci was going to shoot the film in Vancouver and Korea, which would have made this the first Star Trek film to be shot primarily outside of Los Angeles, but it remains to be seen whether those plans have been scrapped, too.
In the meantime: What, you might be wondering, are Justin Lin’s credentials?
Well, for starters, he directed the last four movies in the Fast & Furious franchise. Lin, in fact, oversaw a minor miracle of sorts, coming on board that series when it was at its lowest (with Tokyo Drift), and then gradually building it up into one of the most enjoyable action franchises around. I can’t think of another major series that had “rotten” ratings at Rotten Tomatoes for its first four installments and then suddenly got “fresh” ratings for movies five and six — but Lin did it. Many Trekkies, including myself, would argue that the Star Trek movies don’t have to be action-oriented — after all, the most popular film before the reboot was The Voyage Home, a.k.a. “the one with the whales”, and that was a comedy without any villains — but if action is what the studio wants these days, then Lin has more than proven his chops.
What’s more, with the last few Fast & Furious films, Lin helped to create one of the most ethnically diverse franchises around — and Star Trek, of course, has always relied on an ensemble cast who were meant to represent the entire world. Lin has even worked with John Cho, the actor who plays Sulu, before; Cho co-starred in Lin’s first two films, Shopping for Fangs (1997) and Better Luck Tomorrow (2002).
And while this obviously means nothing from an artistic perspective, Lin also probably has more box-office cred than any director who has joined this franchise since Robert Wise directed the original film 35 years ago. Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, David Carson and Jonathan Frakes all had no feature directing experience whatsoever — they were all veterans of the Star Trek TV shows — when they first tackled the job of directing a Star Trek movie. Nicholas Meyer and J.J. Abrams had each directed a single film prior to directing their first Star Trek movie, and Stu Baird had directed just two films before he killed the franchise with Star Trek: Nemesis. Lin, on the other hand, has eight films under his belt, the last two of which were much bigger hits worldwide than any Star Trek film has ever been. That beats pretty much all of Lin’s predecessors except for Wise, whose hits The Sound of Music and West Side Story still rank among the top-grossing films of all time once you adjust for inflation.
So, even as the studio parts ways with Orci and company in all but name, it seems that the studio really wants to invest in the Star Trek franchise, even more than it did during Abrams’ turn at the helm. Everything hinges now on the script.
As I ponder all this, I find myself caught between two analogies.
On the one hand, I am reminded of how the first two X-Men films were pretty good, and then director Bryan Singer left the franchise to make the superhero movie he really wanted to make (i.e. Superman Returns), and as a result, the third X-Men movie was given to a director who was not worthy — and the results were so bad that Singer came back to the franchise this year and made a time-travel flick that basically wiped out the timeline in which those original films took place.
On the other hand, I am also reminded of how the first “rebooted” James Bond movie was pretty good, but then the second one was a big disappointment, so the producers made a special effort to get things right for the third film, which happened to come out in time for the franchise’s 50th anniversary — and while I didn’t care much for Skyfall myself when I first saw it, it was certainly a huge, huge box-office hit.
For now, I’m leaning towards the latter analogy, though there are obvious caveats. In the case of Skyfall, the producers decided to class things up by hiring an Oscar-winning director and an extremely talented cinematographer, while in the case of the next Star Trek movie, the studio has gone for someone who knows his way around popcorn entertainment. But the end goal is the same: a successful hit film.
We shall see how successful the studio’s plans are in a little over 18 months.
Incidentally, two other points:
First, I wonder what will become of the Star Trek comics, which Orci has been overseeing — and which Orci says he regards as canon — if Orci himself is no longer involved in writing the films. Orci says he’s the guy who came up with the idea of setting these films inside a parallel universe in the first place. So would he want to work on stories based on someone else’s vision for that universe? What if this new film ends up ignoring or even contradicting the stories that Orci has overseen?
And second, a year and a half isn’t a lot of time to write and produce a film like this, so we can’t rule out the possibility that the studio will bump the date to sometime later in the year. It’s certainly happened before: the first J.J. Abrams film was set for Christmas 2008 but got bumped to May 2009, and Star Trek into Darkness was originally scheduled for June 2012 before it got bumped to May 2013. So it wouldn’t surprise me if the studio decided at some point down the road to release this film around Christmas instead of in the summer. As ever, we shall see.
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