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Thursday 16 August 2018

Pecking Away While the Kelvin Timeline Pines...


Will the next Star Trek movie be the Tarantino-directed adventure? Will it be helmed by S J Clarkson marking the first female directed franchise movie?

But before those questions can be answered it seems we might not even have a full cast with the surprise news that talks with both Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth have collapsed leaving Star Trek 4 potentially without two of its biggest star attractions.

Now you can whinge and whine as much as you want about JJ's Star Trek movie saga but it did bring the franchise back to the masses after a drought of four years since the end of Enterprise and seven years since Nemesis had disappointed the fan base with its non-ending to the cinematic adventures of The Next Generation.

But the rebooted adventures of the USS Enterprise under the guidance of James T Kirk may be restricted to just a trilogy following the news that Pine and Hemsworth - who was set to reprise his role as George Kirk - were expecting a bigger deal more befitting their A-list status.

The Wonder Woman and Thor stars have certainly been elevated to another Hollywood level in recent years but we did believe that they were already signed for the fourth Kelvin Timeline movie however it doesn't seem to be the case. In fact the disappointing response to Beyond may have provided leverage when it came down to the hard cold fact of negotiations. You have to suspect that Pine will have had some form of get-out clause in there should the third movie have been a box office disaster which for all intents and purposes versus the '09 and Into Darkness movies it actually was.

While the fourth movie might be able to survive without Chris Hemsworth (after all George Kirk was only in the 2009 movie for five minutes), it certainly can't continue without its Kirk and recasting now would surely prove a bad move given how much we as fans have bought into this rebooted crew. Just as recasting Chekov following the tragic passing of Anton Yelchin was quickly vetoed, adding a new actor in as Kirk would misstep the franchise and maybe set it back even further than Into Darkness managed.

I would theorise that this isn't the last we will hear of this story since there's been very little word on the next movie excursion bar the potential directors and the involvement of Hemsworth which was announced almost as soon as Beyond was released. Will Bad Robot bend to their demands or will they walk away? Who can say at this moment but you'd have to be thinking that having the two Chris' in the cast list would be a surefire winner at the box office.

While Star Trek 4 is looking like it might be losing some of its star quality, Discovery is firing in the other direction with the official announcement that Ethan Peck will be donning the ears and Starfleet uniform to become the third actor to play an adult version of Spock.

This time the Vulcan is on the USS Enterprise as its chief science officer under the command of Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) but with the late casting announcement and the series surely about to take its mid-season filming break you can but speculate that Spock is going to appear in the mid-season cliffhanger a matter of seconds before the screen cuts to the end credits.

Grandson to movie star Gregory Peck, the new Spock actor certainly comes from a healthy background of acting and has already been endorsed, it seems, by the Nimoy family as seen via the Adam Nimoy Twitter feed today.

There's not a lot else to really say about this one apart from I would think a lot of work will have gone into making sure that this is as good as possible a casting otherwise there will be a revolt amongst Star Trek purists.

I'm quite excited about seeing Peck's interpretation of the role since it will be the first Spock appearance on the small screen since he turned up in season five of The Next Generation for the 25th anniversary story, Unification - yes, it's been that long! Now it's only a matter of time until we get the first shots of Mr Peck in full makeup.

What do you think about the latest events rocking the franchise? Will everything end up happily ever after? Will this mark the end of the Kelvin Timeline?

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