“They had a script for Star Trek that wasn’t really working for them. I think the studio was worried that it might have been a little bit too Star Trek-y,” Simon Pegg tells The Guardian of an earlier draft for the next “Star Trek” movie, presumably one co-written by Roberto Orci.
Orci co-wrote the two blockbuster J.J. Abrams-directed Trek movies released in 2009 and 2013. Widely acknowledged as the Trekkie-est of Abrams’ Trek writers, Orci was for a minute set to direct the next Trek movie from a screenplay he wrote with two writers new to the franchise.
Eventually Orci exited the director’s chair and Paramount hired “Furious 6” helmer Justin Lin to direct the next Trek (rumored to be titled “Star Trek Beyond”) from a screenplay by Doug Jung (“Big Love,” “Dark Blue,” “Banshee”) and Pegg.
Pegg not only replaced the late James Doohan in the role of chief engineer Montgomery Scott in the Trek movies, he’s also co-written the big-screen comedies “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz,” “Run, Fatboy, Run,” “Paul” and “The World’s End.”
“Avengers Assemble, which is a pretty nerdy, comic-book, supposedly niche thing, made $1.5 billion. Star Trek: Into Darkness made half a billion, which is still brilliant,” Pegg explained to the paper. “But it means that, according to the studio, there’s still $1 billion worth of box office that don’t go and see Star Trek. And they want to know why.”
From The Guardian:
[Pegg] added: “People don’t see [Trek] being a fun, brightly coloured, Saturday night entertainment like the Avengers,” adding that the solution was to “make a western or a thriller or a heist movie, then populate that with Star Trek characters so it’s more inclusive to an audience that might be a little bit reticent”.
While Paramount would of course like to see the next “Trek” make “Avengers” money, Pegg himself doesn’t seem to be the biggest fan of that Marvel franchise. “Now we’re essentially all consuming very childish things – comic books, superheroes,” Pegg says in the new Guardian article. “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.”
Find all of The Guardian's excellent interview with Pegg here.
