Star Trek 3 confirmed for 2016

It seemed a pretty obvious target, with 2016 being the fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek, and falling a comfortable three years after Into Darkness, but it has now been confirmed: The third nuTrek movie will be released in 2016. This news came along with the announcement of sequels in other franchises from a Paramount presentation at the CineEurope convention, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. That was all that was reported about Star Trek, but we do know a little more already.

There are some big changes in the creative team to the next nuTrek movie. With J.J. Abrams busy doing Star Wars he will be stepping back from directing this instalment, but will still be involved as a producer. While it has not been officially confirmed yet, Variety have reported with some certainty that Roberto Orci will be stepping up to direct, the first time he will take on the roll after being well established writer and producer on the previous Star Trek films and many others (including the Transformers and Spiderman franchises).

Orci will also be continuing as one of the writers, but his usual writing partner, Alex Kurtzman, will not be involved this time, as the partnership is splitting to allow both to pursue directorial roles (as reported by The Hollywood Reporter). Two new writers, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, will be filling out the writing team. Both are new comers, and Star Trek looks likely to be their first produced script. In an interview with Morman Artist Payne revealed a little about the history of the writing partnership, who have been working together since high school, and have several projects on the go with Bad Robot. At the LDS Film Festival Payne also talked about his work, and Star Trek in particular. The full video of that is no longer online, but fortunately TrekCore nabbed the key moments before it went down (here and here), in which Payne reveals an exploration focus and moral dilemma to face the crew:

The sense we have is, that it's really been teed up to really do the boldly going. We had the origin story, we had the darker grittier man-hunt Star Trek, but this one we really want to get back to the sense of exploration and wonder, that optimistic sense of the future that Star Trek has always had at its core.

We're trying to set up a kind of situation where you really could -- and not in just an everything's relative sort of moral relativism - you could be a good person of any creed or philosophical background and come down on both sides of how you should respond to this opportunity that the crew has.... that also has some pitfalls to it. Where you could argue very, very, very compellingly that this is what you should do, and if you're advocating this then it's actually evil.

It's sort of the Adam and Eve thing, where should we eat the fruit or not eat the fruit? Well, there are some very compelling reasons why they should and why they shouldn't. So, similar kinds of things here that really give the whole movie and opportunity to sort of play with that, and have people come down on different side and wrestle with it; then come to an ending where you can walk out and say, "You know, I don't know what I would do".