Trivia / Star Trek Beyond

• Acclaimed Flop: Despite being seen as a Surprisingly Improved Sequel by critics and fans alike, and though the film grossed $343,322,891 worldwide, it only made $158,848,340 domestically from a $185 million budget.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget: $185 million. Total worldwide gross: $343.5 million. The film didn't recoup its budget domestically, and barely broke even internationally. Reports emerged in 2018, when the planned sequel was going through a tumultuous pre-production phase, that it actually lost even more money than Star Trek: Nemesis did (not accounting for 14 years of inflation), despite grossing far more at the box-office.
• B-Team Sequel:
  • J. J. Abrams was off directing The Force Awakens, while Alex Kurtzman was busy on Star Trek: Discovery.
  • Roberto Orci was originally going to write and direct the film, but Creative Differences with Paramount saw him replaced by Justin Lin as director, and Simon Pegg and Doug Jung as writers.
  • A fan campaign briefly tried to get Jonathan Frakes to direct.
• The Character Died with Him:
  • After Leonard Nimoy's death, Ambassador Spock's passing was written into Star Trek Beyond. Consequently, this is the first Star Trek film with no cast members from any of the TV series.
  • Had a fourth film in the series been made, this would also have been the case with Chekov; Anton Yelchin passed away shortly before the film's release, and the producers confirmed that they had no plans to recast the character.
• Deleted Scene:
  • McCoy picking up a gun and having a crisis of what it meant to fire a weapon.
  • Sulu discussing with Uhura his guilt about his husband having moved out to Starbase Yorktown to aid his career.
  • Scotty explains to Kirk that he himself needed to leave because he was about to have a meal with Romaine.
  • A brief scene between Scotty and Jaylah onboard the Franklin was cut, where the alien commented on Scotty's strange use of the English language.
  • A longer shot of Scotty in the torpedo bay.
• Dueling Movies: With Independence Day: Resurgence, which was released a few weeks before this film. While Beyond was far better reviewed, it ended up losing pretty decisively box-office wise, grossing $330m worldwide on a $185m budget, compared to the $390m gross and $165m budget of Resurgence.
• Development Gag: Jaylah's name comes from "J. Law", as she's inspired by Jennifer Lawrence's character in Winter's Bone. This echoes the character Sha Ka Ree from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, named for Sean Connery.
• Disowned Adaptation: A very minor one, but George Takei didn't completely agree with the reveal of Sulu's sexuality.^note  To be clear, Takei did approve of Star Trek Beyond's effort to include LGBT representation but felt the choice to make Sulu gay had less to do with the character, as originally conceived by himself and Gene Roddenberry, and he saw it more as a gimmick based on his sexuality.
• Executive Meddling: According to Simon Pegg, he believes that shoving "Sabotage" into the first trailer, which was supposed to be a big surprise when the Franklin charged into the Swarm and cutting the first trailer to make it a "bone-headed action movie" hurt the movie's chances.
• Franchise Killer: Beyond stopped the Kelvin Timeline film series in its tracks, leading to a Soft Reboot of the prime universe in streaming television with Star Trek: Discovery and its successors. As of 2023, Star Trek is in its longest streak without a movie in franchise history, having surpassed the seven-year gap between Nemesis and 2009's Trek. This happened in several stages:
  1. In January 2019, Paramount announced the Kelvinverse franchise was "indefinitely canceled" in the wake of Beyond's performance, making clear that they wanted to bring the next film's budget way down, as each Kelvinverse film had a larger budget with a smaller (domestic) gross at the box office than the last.
  2. A proposed fourth film was to piggy-back off the increased star power of Chris Hemsworth, who had a small role as Kirk's father in the first Kelvin film before his stardom as Thor, and Chris Pine, fresh off Wonder Woman (2017), but the movie fell through due to financial reasons (the stars would need to take pay cuts) and script concerns (Hemsworth didn't like it). The rest of the cast, for their part, were said to be extremely reluctant to return without the late Anton Yelchin as Chekov.
  3. The merger of Paramount's parent company, Viacom, with CBS later in 2019 restored Paramount's ability to make movies based on the Prime Timeline, further burying any hope of the Kelvinverse being continued in any substantial form. Several proposed scripts and pitches were floated, with names like Quentin Tarantino and Noah Hawley attached, but all wound up in Development Hell until two movies were greenlit in late 2021, although the premise and timelines were not revealed at the time despite a new director (Matt Shankman of WandaVision) and writers being attached to one of them. In February of 2022, a Shankman-directed film was announced as a continuation of the Kelvinverse, with the entire surviving cast of the previous three films (including Pine) returning. However, that September, Shankman walked away from the film (just one day after it was announced that he would helm a new Fantastic Four movie) and the movie was subsequently dropped from Paramount's release schedule.
• In Memoriam: "In Loving Memory of Leonard Nimoy" ... "For Anton"
• Milestone Celebration: Its 2016 release date commemorates the Star Trek franchise's 50th anniversary, and there are many homages and meta-commentaries on the special occasion.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: In that Simon Pegg and Doug Jung specifically asked the creators of the Memory Alpha wiki to create and name the mineral from Uhura's necklace. The request was a gift of gratitude from Pegg and Jung, as the wiki helped them keep their continuity in check as they wrote the script.
• Posthumous Credit: The first for Anton Yelchin, who was killed a little over a month before the film's release (June 19) in an incident with his own vehicle.
• Promoted Fanboy: Director Justin Lin grew up watching the original series in reruns. Rihanna, who contributed a song to the credits, is also a life-long fan.
• Scully Box: Jaylah's boots, whose heels were asked for by Sofia Boutella so she wouldn't appear too short.
• Spared by the Cut: Jason Matthew Smith revealed that Hendorff was to have been killed by Krall. However, all of these scenes were cut, due to tweaks to the story during the editing process. In one scene included in the film, he is barely visible behind Keenser, in a line of Enterprise crew being herded into captivity.
• Throw It In!: Jaylah taking the captain's chair was improvised by Sofia Boutella during rehearsal, and agreed upon to do it in filming.
• Troubled Production: While production itself went by smoothly, making the movie take off was not easy. J. J. Abrams left for The Force Awakens, co-writer Alex Kurtzman went to create Star Trek: Discovery, and the other writer, Roberto Orci, was appointed as writer-director by Paramount. He went on to hiring key production staffers and having initial sets built before Creative Differences with Paramount led to his dismissal. Justin Lin was eventually hired to replace Orci, and a new script was written by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung in a very short period, with both considering giving up several times during the process. Leonard Nimoy's decaying health didn't allow for a cameo, and the screenplay was rewritten to specify that The Character Died with Him. And once things were done, a badly received trailer came out, that both Pegg and Lin disowned and might have hurt the film's box office performance.
• What Could Have Been: See the page
• Word of Gay: Sulu, effectively, as an homage to original actor George Takei. His interaction with his husband is seconds long, and so chaste that they could be friends or brothers. His marriage isn't mentioned in dialogue either, so almost all of the information about his sexuality came from publicity material.
• Written by Cast Member: Simon Pegg is credited as co-writer, making him the fourth Star Trek cast member (after Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner and Brent Spiner) to write a Trek film, albeit the first one to get an actual screenplay credit instead of just a "story by" credit, and also the first who had any prior experience of writing a theatrically-released film.
• You Look Familiar: J. J. Abrams regular Greg Grunberg returns, this time playing the Yorktown operations chief.

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