SCRIPT: STAR TREK BEYOND Co-Writer Simon Pegg Says Studio Found Earlier Scripts “Too Star Trek-y”

Star Trek 3 co-screenwriter Simon Pegg plays Scotty on far right.

Will Star Trek 3 be a more “fun, brightly coloured, Saturday night entertainment” like The Avengers but populated by Star Trek characters? Star Trek Beyond begins filming in metro Vancouver late next month with a new script co-written by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung. A script that will be “more inclusive” than earlier scripts that were a  “little too Star Trek-y”, Pegg told British magazine Radio Times. Reportedly, Paramount questioned why the supposedly niche Marvel’s The Avengers franchise made a billion dollars more in worldwide box office than the better-known Star Trek brand with its second rebooted installment,  Star Trek: Into Darkness. The studio likely feels vindicated about its concerns by the recent mega-success of Avengers: Age of Ultron.

The solution: a script more like the original Star Trek reboot of 2009 with elements of “a western or a thriller or a heist movie”.

Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and the Enterprise crew — Spock (Zachary Quinto), Bones (Karl Urban), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho), Chekov (Anton Yeltin) and Scotty (Simon Pegg) — are expected in Vancouver this summer to film the third instalment of J.J. Abrams’s rebooted franchise in Vancouver Film Studios with the production code Washington.  Production was delayed after director/writer Roberto Orci bowed out. Justin Lin (who revived the Fast and Furious franchise) will direct. And Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service) is cast as the female lead.

The Trekmovie site reported last October that Star Trek 3 would film mainly in Vancouver and plans to “rebuild the Enterprise sets from scratch” in studio here. Paramount hopes for a summer 2016 release to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the debut of Star Trek on television which starred the original Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (the late Leonard Nimoy).

Metro Vancouver filming dates: June 25th to October 1st  (subject to change) via DGC-BC Production List.

Postscript:

Simon Pegg, a self-professed geek, will no doubt deliver on an Avengers-style script for Star Trek 3 but he seems fed up with the degree to which comic books and super heroes dominate our culture now. “Obviously I’m very much a self-confessed fan of science fiction and genre cinema but part of me looks at society as it is now and just thinks we’ve been infantilised by our own taste. Now we’re essentially all consuming very childish things – comic books, superheroes. Adults are watching this stuff, and taking it seriously. It is a kind of dumbing down, in a way, because it’s taking our focus away from real-world issues. Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys or moral questions that might make you walk away and re-evaluate how you felt about … whatever,. Now we’re walking out of the cinema really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk just had a fight with a robot.” he told Radio Times.