There will be no new Trek movie until 2012 at the earliest, according to director JJ Abrams and co-writer Damon Lindelof at the LA press launch for the DVD and Blu-ray release of Star Trek.
Talking to Sci Fi Wire Lindelof suggested: “I think that we would be hard pressed to get it on screens by 2011. If that's the case, we'd better get to writing right now." Abrams added: "It's like closet space. You use what you've got. The more time you have, the more time you have to use to hopefully make it a better movie."
Lindelof also hinted that the sequel may not necessarily take place exclusively after the events of the first film, though that might not mean time travel is invloved. He's thinking more along the lines of the way The Bourne Ultimatum takes place largely in between events from The Bourne Supremacy: "One of the things we like to do as storytellers is drop you in the middle of something. And the question that you're asking yourself is: Where am I in relation to the last time I left these guys? Could this be something that predated even, perhaps, some of the adventures that they had in the first movie? Does it happen five years later? Is it happening two seconds later? Who knows? So we're not going to tell you. We want to give the audience an experience that feels like it's not a sequel in all the best ways."
The writing team also promises that the Spock/Uhura relation will have to be taken to the next level.
Meanwhile, over at Coming Soon , they’re reporting that if Khan is the baddie in the sequel (and that’s purely rumour at the moment) Abrams and Lindelof have an old colleague in mind to play the role – Nestor Carbonell, who plays Richard Alpert (eyeliner man) in Lost. “There are way too many variables right now, including the fact that the Khan character may not even be in the sequelm” says the article. “We just know that if they started filming today, he would be their man.”
