Paramount's Star Trek Plans For 2016

In a presentation at the recent CineEurope convention, Paramount officially confirmed they will be aiming to release the third Star Trek film in 2016, the 50th Anniversary of the franchise.

We also now know just a bit more about the story. With J.J. Abrams busy in a galaxy far, far away, it's been all but officially announced that screenwriter Robert Orci will be sitting in the director's chair - for the very first time.

Orci has brought on two new writers, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay. In an interview with Mormon Artist and in an interview at the LDS film festival, Payne revealed some nuggets about where Trek 3 will boldy go:

"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."