Considering the incredible success of director J.J. Abrams' Star Trek revamp, it was almost a foregone conclusion that Paramount Pictures would move forward with plans for a sequel. However, in the months since Star Trek debuted, there has been little heard about the proposed sequel beyond William Shatner 's plea to appear in the next movie and numerous internet rumors about Khan Noonien Singh, the genetically enhanced superhuman played by Ricardo Montalbán in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, making a return.
At the recent Star Trek DVD/Blu-Ray release party, Abrams and writer-producer Damon Lindelof spoke with Sci-Fi Wire about the planned sequel, which Lindelof said Paramount would be "hard pressed" to release by 2011, joking, "If that's the case, we'd better get to writing right now." Abrams confirmed Lindelof's statements about the script, or lack thereof, and mentioned that his involvement in the sequel is not set in stone.
In theory, I would be available [to direct Star Trek 2], and it would be fun to do. Since there's no script, it's hard to talk about directing a movie that the story doesn't even exist.
However, even without a script, Lindelof teased that Star Trek 2 might not be a linear sequel after all.
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.
And, as for the rumors of Khan appearing in Star Trek 2, even though Abrams said earlier this month that "nothing is off limits," he told Sci-Fi Wire:
We're not even at that stage yet, but the fun of where we are on the sequel is we could use some of what was done before in a new way. But we haven't even figured out what we would use yet, so it's very early on.