Sequel Draft By End of Year

In an interview with IGN to promote Hawaii Five-O, Star Trek and Transformers writer Roberto Orci provided an update on the sequel and his other projects. Below is the Trek related portions of the interview, the rest can be found here. (via TrekMovie)

GN: J.J. Abrams is about to shoot Super 8. After that, has he decided if he's going to direct the Star Trek sequel or not?
Orci: You know him. Until he reads the script and gets super excited he's not going to commit to anything. God Bless him. Just like the first movie.

IGN: Is the next Star Trek still looking to shoot around the middle of next year?
Orci: We'll work backwards from 2012. So you know, you can do the math. We've got to probably turn it in by Christmas and get a pretty good draft by then. And then kind of get it up and running.

IGN: Second movies, including Wrath of Khan, are often the dark chapter. Things often get pretty intense. Are you going to go in that direction?
Orci: Well, it's weird. We got kind of a mixed review in terms of the darkness or not in the first one. There was genocide of an entire planet, Spock's freaking mother died, Kirk's dad died… But it's like, "Well, it wasn't very dark!"

So I think maybe thematically, because we don't have the burden of an origin story, we can play a little bit more with the theme and it can be a little bit more complicated. But I still think we like fun. Star Trek has always been funny. Even Wrath of Khan has got some great great, great fun in it. I think it will be equally confusing for some, but I do think we get to jump right into it now.

IGN: Leonard Nimoy's been very adamant that he's done acting. Were there ideas you had for the sequel that are derailed by that?
Orci: He was so generous and gracious to us as fans and to us as people working on that franchise to come out of retirement that it's embarrassing to ask him to do another god damn thing. So if he came over and said, "I really want to do something," we'd listen. But we're not about to go and beg him one more time. He has served Star Trek more amiably than anyone can ever hope and we will defer to his wishes.