Star Trek Beyond round-up: Stills, posters, tweaked release dates, ST4, and more

Tonight the long awaited second trailer for Star Trek Beyond will be released, at a special fan event hosted by Paramount in LA, which also promises to include "exclusive first look at previously unseen footage from Beyond, a Q and A with Lin, cast members and crew, as well as special guest appearances and other surprises". Over the past few weeks Paramount have been promoting various ways to get tickets to that event, but if you didn't win, or weren't close enough, it will be streamed online too.

Hopefully this will be the start of Paramount's big marketing push for the film, which is only two months away from release now. Meanwhile building up to tonight Paramount have been steadily getting the marketing machine into gear, with lots of new images, interviews, and more. Continue below for all the latest on Star Trek Beyond, including news of updated international release dates. Proceed with spoiler caution, some of the images say a lot...

Quite a few images from the film have also been released recently. One that seems to be little circulated so far, but rather exciting, was posted by the Facebook page of a production company called Harvest Moon Productions, and appears to show the last moments of the Enterprise:

Could this be a still from a very spoilerific trailer, the caption seems to imply so:

New STAR TREK BEYOND trailer drops on Friday!!! Looks like we may have to say goodbye to the ENTERPRISE this time round. Who's ready for the 50th anniversary journey through the FINAL FRONTIER???

Perhaps this is no great secret though, the first trailer heavily implied the end of the Enterprise as we know it, and in a recent interview with Wired, director Justin Lin revealed his first pitch when asked to take on the film was to destroy the Enterprise! This act comes with motive, for how he wanted to use the characters:

Instead of recycling old enemies (as in the controversial yet wildly successful Star Trek Into Darkness), he wanted to take away every familiar comfort of Starfleet, the bridge, and the recent films to “make the characters as raw as possible,” Lin says, “and build them back up.” He wanted to refocus the franchise on how the crew would react as underdogs, in an unfamiliar world, facing unknown enemies.

The interview doesn't reveal a lot else about the film, beyond some incites into how Lin works as a director, but is a pretty effective biography of the film maker, and puts a pleasing emphasis on this efforts to bring genuine diversity to Hollywood films - An interesting read. The article also released this new image of Spock for the first time, in which he appears to be examining some alien device.

A more deadly moment was capture in an image of the film's antagonist, Krall, initially released by Entertainment Weekly.

In the accompanying interview, actor Idris Elba gave some interesting insights into his character, and by extension the themes of the film:

What’s interesting about him is that he has a real beef with what the Enterprise stands for. Krall’s a character who’s deeply steeped in hatred — in my opinion, a well-earned hatred — for the Federation. It felt quite political. There’s a relatability to what’s happening in our world. Not everybody’s happy with what everybody calls the good guys.

There’s some history that we explore, to understand why he feels the frontier needs to push back. There’s definitely an opposing argument to the good that the Federation think they do. There are purists that believe in independence, and believe that we’re all made differently for a reason, and will fight tooth and nail to defend that. There’s massive relatability to modern world politics in that sense.

The film's other major new character, Jaylah, as played by Sofia Boutella, features in several of the new images. Such as this one released by Empire, showing her sneaking around with Spock and McCoy.

Jaylah seems to get along with much of the crew, taking the center seat on their new ship (the Franklin?) along side Kirk and Scotty, in this images released by the New York Times.

And we can get a much better view of that bridge set and more in other images released by IGN and Check Magazine:

IGN also released these behind the scenes shots of Justin Lin on set

TrekCore uncovered a further shot, which is featured in Premiére Magazine, of Kirk and Chekov planetside among wreckage:

And TrekCore again found this images of Uhura and Sulu:

A couple more behind the scenes shots come via Simon Pegg's Twitter, showing us an exciting rear view of Keenser's head... And a Starfleet sign:

There have been few early posters released at industry events so far, and it look like those on display at the Cannes Film Festival are pretty snazzy. These images shot by Twitter users Sylvestre Picard and Miko Officiel show the very site specific applications so far, but I'm sure these images will be the basis for regular posters soon too.

That Enterprise artwork is already quite familiar, having been used while promoting the competitions to win tickets to the fan event too. They Boldly Went have managed to locate or create a version free of text:

Meanwhile some Star Trek Beyond branded cups, intended for distribution at cinemas, have found their way into the wild already, and are for sale on Amazon!

One final bit of Beyond news, the listings of international release dates for the film has been updated. It's bad news for a few parts of the world, especially South America, where most countries will see a later releases than initially hoped. And it really sucks if you're in Japan, who now have to wait until late October! A few European countries will now be waiting a week or two longer, while South Africa will be getting slightly earlier than planned, although still waiting until August.

Finally, good news for the future of the film series, as according to TrekMovie, Paramount have now registered "Star Trek 4" with the Motion Picture Association of America. While this doesn't mean they will actually make such a film, they have already signed up Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto to appear in another instalment, so as long as Beyond does all right it seems all but inevitable the voyages will continue beyond Beyond.

Check back later for even more Star Trek Beyond news once the new trailer is released. To keep track of all the latest information on the film, visit my Star Trek Beyond guide page.