Simon Pegg Comments on Star Trek 3

While promoting his next film in an interview with Comic Book Resources, Simon Pegg briefly commented on Star Trek 3 which he is co-writing. The key bit of information is that he is hoping to capture "the spirit of the TV show" and rumors indicate the film will take place at some point during the five year mission.

What got you excited about the opportunity to write the next “Star Trek” movie, and can you talk about the sensibility you want to bring to it?

It just came out of conversations I was having with J.J. [Abrams] and Bryan Burk, and they decided to kind of like restart the process. Because I’d been on the set with Burk-y on “Mission: Impossible,” he said, “Maybe you should come on and write it with Doug and Justin and him and Lindsey Weber. And I was a bit, “No. I don’t want to – it’s too much pressure!”

But I think we just want to take it forward with the spirit of the TV show. And it’s a story about frontierism and adventure and optimism and fun, and that’s where we want to take it, you know. Where no man has gone before – where no one has gone before, sensibly corrected for a slighter more enlightened generation. But yeah, that’s the mood at the moment.

Idris Elba Up for Star Trek 3 Villain

Variety is reporting that Idris Elba (Luther, Thor, Pacific Rim) is being considered by director Justin Lin for the role of the big bad in the movie which might be a Klingon. However none of this has been officially confirmed as the movie is still in pre-production phase as Simon Pegg and Doug Jung continue to write the movie script. Elba is a great actor so really bad guy or not he would be a great addition to the movie.

IDW June 2015 Star Trek Comics

IDW Publishing has released their publishing plans for June 2015. Only one floppy and one trade are coming. At this point surprised that IDW continues to publish the Trek comics as they seem uninterested in the franchise considering that outside of a random crossover they are essentially ignoring 95% of Trek including some excellent novels ripe for adaptation, continuity that continues via the novels and Star Trek Online not to mention they could mimic Marvel's Star Wars approach of telling prequel stories by setting stories in between the movies and the like. For the full details of IDW's other books including GI Joe, TMNT, Transformers, and more click here.

Star Trek Online Adds Leonard Nimoy Memorial

After the passing of Leonard Nimoy last week, Star Trek Online got to work and created a fitting memorial to the actor and character with a statue of Spock with the "Live Long and Prosper" hand signal as he stands before the Vulcan symbol for IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) that basically means embrace the differences. There are two identical statues, one on Vulcan and one on New Romulus (since the "old" one was destroyed in 2009's Star Trek movie). Also at the locations will be "In Memoriam" plaques for the passing of the key actors from The Original Series.

Harve Bennett 1930-2015

Long time Star Trek producer and writer Harve Bennett died Wednesday, March 4th at the age of 84. Bennett produced Star Trek movies 2 through 5 along with a writing credit on each. He also was one of the first to consider an "Academy Years" prequel concept that eventually was sorta picked up by the reboot. His other writer-producer credits include the Mod Squad, The Invisible Man, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman and more.

In an interview with StarTrek.com he said his greatest accomplishment was "[resurrecting] the franchise (at the time) [after Star Trek 1 failed to perform as expected]. That would be my contribution. There might not have been another Star Trek and certainly there would not have been spin had not Star Trek II been such a very viable hit."

He continued, "When I first took the Star Trek assignment, one of the problems was that Leonard Nimoy had already written his book I Am Not Spock. He had publically put it out there that he’d never do Spock again. And one of my first challenges was to convince Leonard that he should come back, because it wouldn’t be Star Trek without him. I finally convinced him with a very simple, actor-proof argument. I said, “Leonard, if you come back, I’m going to give you the greatest death scene since Janet Leigh in Psycho. One third of the way into the picture, we’re going to kill you. The audience will be shocked. It will be the end of your problems with Spock and we will go on to complete the story.” He said, “That’s good. I like that.” So he signed on. For a variety of reasons, including Gene (Roddenberry) and the 100,000 letters the studio received from fans after it got out that we were going to kill off Spock, we couldn’t do it the way we planned. Hence a rewrite and when Nick Meyer, God bless him, came on board we found a way to extend Spock’s role. And it was much better, because I think Wrath of Khan might have been a failure if Spock had died one third of the way through it. So we got Wrath of Khan done, Nick Meyer was brilliant, and the rest is history."

Condolences to Harve Bennett's family and friends.