A few days ago, Star Trek actor Simon Pegg revealed that Paramount Pictures already had a completed script for Star Trek 4 prior to Quentin Tarantino pitching his own idea for an R-rated instalment in the long-running sci-fi series.
Paramount had already announced a fourth entry in the rebooted series prior to the release of Star Trek Beyond, which would have seen Chris Hemsworth reprising his role as George Kirk, father to Chris Pine’s James T. Kirk. However, the studio applied the breaks (or at least slowed development down from warp speed to impulse power) on Trek 4 when Beyond didn’t quite perform as well as expected at the box office – something that actor and co-writer Simon Pegg attributes to a bad marketing campaign:
“I think it was poorly marketed, to be honest,” Pegg tells Geek. “If you look at a film like Suicide Squad, that was around for such a long time before it finally came out and people were so aware of it. Whereas with Star Trek Beyond, it was left too late before they started their marketing push. It still did great business, but it was disappointing compared to Into Darkness.”
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“I was really angry about [the trailer] because it used ‘Sabotage,’ which was our surprise moment in the end,” he continued. “It was supposed to be a very fun and heightened twist, and something that was a big surprise and they blew it in the first trailer, which really annoyed me. They also made the film look like a boneheaded action film. And they were scared, I think, of mentioning the 50th Anniversary. It was fumbled as a thing; they didn’t know what to do with it and it’s a real shame. But I came away from it really, really happy and very proud of it.”
“From a professional standpoint for me, it was such a great experience in the end, because the critical response that we did get was exactly what [co-writer] Doug Jung and I and [director] Justin Lin had hoped for, which was a much more favorable response in terms of being Star Trek and not just something there that’s disguised as Star Trek,” he added.
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Do you agree with Pegg? Did a bad marketing campaign hurt Star Trek Beyond? And are you excited about the franchise potentially going in a new direction under Quentin Tarantino, or would you like to see Paramount sticking to the original plan for Star Trek 4? Let us know below…
Originally published March 28, 2018. Updated November 21, 2019.
