I understand why not everyone has embraced writer/director J.J. Abrams's new vision for Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek universe, which was on full display in his 2009 reboot of the sagging Star Trek film franchise. Like the saying goes, you can't please everyone.
Still with a $257 million box-office performance in North America, where most Trekkies in the world can be found, it's fairly reasonable to say that J.J. Abrams has won over a whole lot of people too. According to boxofficemojo.com, J.J. Abram's Star Trek is the biggest earner of any movie in the series, even adjusting for inflation of ticket prices since the first movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, came out in 1979.
The news, therefore, announced last week, that Abrams has been hired by Disney, new owners of Lucasfilm, to helm the first of a planned trilogy of new Star Wars movies beginning 2015, most likely came as an unpleasant surprise to many people who have enjoyed his take on Trek and who are looking forward to the next installment, Star Trek: Into Darkness. His second film in the Trek series has not even hit theaters, and there's almost a certainty now that he will not be back for a third, at least not anytime soon.
I am by no stretch of the imagination a "Trekkie" but I am a fan of the 2009 Trek film and am also looking forward to this summer's sequel. I basically hated George Lucas' Star Wars prequel trilogy and was welcoming the idea of fresh blood being injected into the franchise, but the thought that this is coming at the expense of another franchise that's only just been rejuvenated leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Under the circumstances I cannot help but be reminded of the time X-Men director Bryan Singer left the franchise to direct the 2006 quasi-sequel-reboot Superman Returns. Singer, at the time, already had two very successful X-Men movies under his belt, and bore the distinction of having ushered in the Marvel age, the new age of comic-book based movies after Joel Schumacher had nearly killed the genre with Batman and Robin in 1997. To many of us Marvel fans, therefore, it came as a bit of a shock when Singer jumped ship to make a Superman movie for Warner Brothers, parent company of Marvel's longtime rival DC Comics. The thing was, Singer wanted to come back to do a third X-Men movie while Fox didn't want to wait. Instead, they cobbled together X-Men: The Last Stand with Brett Ratner while Singer's Superman Returns came out later that year. The X-Men movie grossed marginally more than the Superman movie did at the global box-office, but Singer's Supes film got better reviews. In the end though, both films were viewed as creative misfires. Basically, everybody, except possibly the bean counters, lost. Arguably the biggest losers were the fans.
I dread a similar situation here, to be honest. J.J. Abrams has promised to stay involved with Star Trek, in the same way he remained involved with the Mission Impossible series even though he was replaced by Brad Bird as the director of the last film, Ghost Protocol. Now, if Abrams' replacement does for Trek what Bird did for the MI series, which, basically, was to make the best movie of the entire franchise, then well and good. On the Star Wars side; the fact that announcements have been made at least three years ahead of the planned release date suggests that Abrams and his crew will have plenty of time to craft a film worthy of the franchise's pre-prequel legacy. The alternative result is something too dreadful for fans of either franchise to contemplate.
Here's hoping that, unlike the X-Men/Superman fiasco of some years back, we can see a situation where everyone wins, especially the fans.
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