By Josh Tyler | 9 years ago

We heard a few weeks ago that Benicio del Toro was being cast to play an unspecified villain in the next Star Trek movie. Now his role has been specified. He’ might be playing Khan.

Right now it’s just an unconfirmed rumor being spread by Latino Review, but it’s a rumor that makes a lot of sense if you try to picture Del Toro in full Khan regalia. They’ve gotten a few rumors like this right before. If and when this Khan rumor pans out, I hope every real Star Trek fan out there will have the sense to hop in a life pod and abandon ship.

Why? Because this would be a slap in the face to everyone who bought in to this new take on the franchise we love. The whole point of rebooting Star Trek and putting it in this parallel universe where anything could happen, was so that they could tell new exciting stories without all that baggage of existing canon. More than that, the whole point of the franchise is to “boldly go where no man has gone before”. It’s in the fucking opening monologue. That’s the world of exciting ideas Gene Roddenberry envisioned.

Why not do something new? Well the writers might have… if they’d actually started working on the script for the sequel three years ago like they were supposed to. Instead, somewhat infamously now, the Star Trek team put off working on the next movie for years so they could do other projects. It’s well known that Paramount was growing impatient, and if you’ve procrastinated about something and run out of time what do you do? You might go the laziest, easiest route to get it done. This is, without a doubt, the laziest and easiest route JJ Abrams, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman could have gone.

Hopefully none of this is true, and they were enthusiastic for it and DID come up with an original idea. If it is true, it’s not hard to understand why.

UPDATE! Director JJ Abrams has already come out and denied the whole thing. However it’s worth nothing that Hollywood denies rumors like this, whether they are true or not. They have a long track record of doing so. In fact in the original LR report they said they believed Abrams and Paramount would lie about it, and say there was no truth to the story, if asked.

What I know is that if they are actually doing this, they’re going against everything that the original JJ Abrams movie and Star Trek in general stands for. Why would would a studio like Paramount Pictures agree to something this stupid? The poll on this story is why. Most of the people voting there, casual fans primarily, are voting that they think this is a great idea. Why do so many people want to see something they’ve already seen done in an inferior fashion? Name recognition. People think they want something new, but what they really want is something comfortable and familiar.

That’s why remakes have become so popular. Hollywood realized a few years ago that the only thing that really mattered in their movies was name recognition. When it comes to villains, there’s no villain more recognizable to Khan.

Star Trek fans, when and if this rumor proves true, know that you’re being spit on.

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