Everyone's Too Busy to Make Star Trek 2

A sequel to J. J. Abrams's smash hit reboot of the Star Trek franchise was a gimme long before the film itself showed up in theaters. With the sharp creative team and key cast lined up for a sequel, it seemed like Star Trek 2 would be the ideal centerpiece of Paramount's 2012 summer line-up.

Only it looks like that's not going to happen.

Sure, Star Trek 2 is still a sure thing. But right now, 13 months before its release date (announced, extremely optimistically, by the studio in January), reports say it's still just a 70-page treatment, and J. J. Abrams still hasn't even officially announced his return to the project, much less started preproduction. Star Trek 2, like the first film, has been pushed back, and we'll be lucky if we see it by the 2012 holiday season.

The problem? No, it's not that they're out of ideas. Everyone's just too busy making other movies.

Abrams has been working on the Spielberg-produced Super 8, due out next week, a sci-fi thriller he wrote and directed about events surrounding a mysterious train crash in 1979. The writers from the first film, Abrams collaborators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, have been joined by Damon Lindelof (Lost, Cowboys & Aliens); but they've all been up to their elbows in their own movies (Welcome to People, Ender's Game, and Prometheus, respectively), and haven't gotten past that 70-page treatment. Nor can they really start prepping the film without Abrams. Star Chris Pine, meanwhile, was tied up with the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan series reboot, which now has been send back to the rewriting stage--freeing Pine to shoot Trek first (if they do it soon).

I don't mind--these are talented, very in-demand people, and I want to make sure they do this film right. I'm tired of mindless summer shoot-em-ups where you sit there in the theater given nothing to do with your brain but tally the CGI bill. Still, at the end of the day, Star Trek 2 has a cast and a treatment, but no script and no director. I initially started cataloging the first film as Star Trek (2008), only to reassign it to 2009 as the film wended through its long development process. I won't be at all surprised if I end up listing the film as Star Trek 2 (2013) by the time anything tangible starts to happen.

Tags: Star Trek, J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, Damon Lindelof, Chris Pine Follow me on Twitter  |  Follow me on Facebook