OT: Star Trek 11 (?) news...

[Black_Knyght]

For anyone who's interested.....

Trek's Abrams Eyes Damon?

The Insider, the syndicated gossip TV series, reported a rumor that Matt Damon is being eyed to play a young Capt. James T. Kirk in J.J. Abrams' proposed 11th Star Trek movie.

Citing an anonymous source, the show reported that Abrams (Mission: Impossible III) is so interested in Damon (The Bourne Identity) that he's sought support from the original Kirk, William Shatner. "Shatner gave his blessing," the source reportedly told the show. "J.J. got his approval."

Rumors are circulating that Abrams' Trek movie will be a prequel to the original series, centering on Kirk and Spock's early days at Starfleet. "J.J. wants Damon as Capt. Kirk," the source said. "He really loves the idea."

For their part, Abrams and his Trek producing partner Bryan Burk (who is also an executive producer on Abram's hit ABC series Lost) have declined to comment on speculation about the movie's storyline, saying only that any reports about its narrative have been released prematurely.

Secret Trek Treatment Revealed

In 2004, television producer Bryce Zabel (The Crow: Stairway to Heaven) and fellow producer J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5) had an idea to "reboot" Star Trek—an idea that ultimately never came to fruition, though it caught the attention of Trek fans. Since then, the news has emerged that Mission: Impossible III director J.J. Abrams is developing his own take on Star Trek for a proposed 11th film. And Zabel has chosen to post the 14-page treatment he and Straczynski developed on his own blog so that fans can finally get a look at the Trek that might have been.

The treatment called for a re-imagining of the original series, centering on the three main characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, set on the U.S.S. Enterprise on its first five-year mission. Zabel told SCI FI Wire that the show would reset the mythology to "start a new 'Universe B' which would be free to move in new directions as needed and yet allow us to work with the classic characters that all fans love and cherish. The best of all worlds, if you will."

As for the ship's mission, Zabel said the new mission would be "oriented toward discovering the truth behind an ancient life that appears to have had a hand in creating the numerous humanoid species throughout the universe. That would have been the over-mission, which would have steered the Enterprise into finding its share of new worlds and civilizations just the same."

Zabel wrote on his BLOG: "We wanted to do what they do in the world of comics, create a separate universe so we could embrace the good stuff, banish the bad, and try some new things. We wanted to use Kirk, Spock and McCoy, but show them off as you'd never seen them before."

So why release the treatment now? "Might as well let the fans who'd heard about it and wanted to see it, see it," Zabel wrote.