Over the past couple weeks, we have been extremely curious who Paramount Pictures would find to replace Roberto Orci at the helm of the upcoming Star Trek 3, and now it seems as though they may have found their guy. Justin Lin is now the man attached to follow J.J. Abrams as the director of the rebooted sci-fi series that began back in 2009.
This news comes to us from the folks at Deadline, which says that Paramount, Skydance Productions and Bad Robot have all come together in agreement that the Fast & Furious 6 director will be the man that helms the next installment of Star Trek. While he is replacing Roberto Orci at the helm of the project, but it's believed that he will continue to use the script that has been written by J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay - who were hired on to the film a little more than a year ago.
Justin Lin has become a well-established director in the world of action films, having helmed the last three installments of the Fast & Furious franchise, but he wasn't the only big name filmmaker who was being considered for the Star Trek 3 director's chair. Previous reports noted that Lin was one of five names on a shortlist of candidates for the job, and all of his competitors were pretty big names. Among them were Rise of the Planet of the Apes' Rupert Wyatt, The Imitation Game's Morten Tyldum, Safe House's Daniel Espinosa, and Source Code's Duncan Jones. Deadline's report notes that while all of these men were suggested for the position, it was ultimately only Justin Lin who got an offer - and it seems that he took it.
It's worth noting that this actually isn't the first franchise gig that Lin has been offered since handing the reins for Fast & Furious 7 over to James Wan. Having worked with him on his last three movies, Universal originally hired Lin to helm the next installment of the Bourne franchise - but that was back when there was a plan to make another movie starring Jeremy Renner as The Bourne Legacy's Aaron Cross. Back in November it was made official that both director Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon were returning to the series, and that meant bumping the Justin Lin-Jeremy Renner collaboration. This led to Lin's calendar opening up, thus making him available for the Star Trek 3 gig.
But how will Star Trek fans react to this news? The sci-fi franchise has classically been more about larger concepts as opposed to big action sequences, and Lin's hiring suggests that Paramount, Skydance and Bad Robot are looking for more of the latter. At the same time, Lin is also a smart director, and may very well have some Trekkie credentials that we don't know about. What do you think?
