When Mike wrote about Idris Elba‘s casting in Harmony Korine‘s new movie Star Trek 3 to be directed by Justin Lin (Fast & Furious 6).
Variety breaks the news saying Elba is in early talks to play the villain with stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana and Anton Yelchin all set to reprise their roles as members of the Enterprise crew. As of now, Pegg and Doug Jung are writing the film’s screenplay.
There is no word on what character Elba would be playing, but Variety cites rumors suggesting Klingons would be the main villains in the movie. That wouldn’t be too surprising.
Pegg recently spoke with Collider about writing the screenplay and had this to say about how it came to be involved in the actual writing of the next installment.
“Me and Bryan Burk, who’s one of the producers at Bad Robot, have worked together on a bunch of stuff. We were sitting around, talking about the direction the next film was gonna go in. They were thinking, “Maybe we should go back to the drawing board, a little bit, with the screenplay.” Bryan and I would just sit around and talk, and we’d get excited. And then, Bryan was like, “Do you want to write it then?” It was a difficult decision. I hemmed and hawed about it, a little bit, because it felt like a big responsibility. I owe J.J. [Abrams] and Bryan an awful amount. I love those guys. I want to do right by them, so I felt like I should man up and do it.”
Star Trek 3 is currently slated for a July 8, 2016 release though that date may get more and more tested if they don’t begin filming soon.
Pegg says the script is due in June, “come hell or high water” and adds, “I’m sure we’ll be finessing it, right through the shoot. You never really, truly start writing a movie until the edit. There’s a whole new lexicon that you’re confronted with, when you’ve shot the movie, which is the visual language that you don’t have on the page. And then, you start to realize, ‘Hang on, we don’t need that speech because that look says it all.’ So, it will be an ongoing thing, right until next year.”
