Paramount Pictures
Destruction, devastation and Benedict Cumberbatch. What more do you want? Get ready for things to ramp up for the next J.J. Abrams Star Trek film. When The Hobbit opens on December 14th, it’ll bring with it exclusive footage from Star Trek: Into Darkness. Regular theaters get a little taste, but see it in IMAX and you’ll get nine beefy minutes of the movie – that’s a hell of a lot for a teaser.
Before then, though, we have this teaser poster to chew on. Paramount released it over the weekend and it’s a curious beast indeed. First and foremost, it doesn’t show any of the returning cast members that will be crewing the Enterprise – no Chris Pine, no Zachary Quinto, no Zoe Saldana. Just one person, seen from the back: Benedict Cumberbatch, who will be playing the villain in the movie.
One problem: we still don’t know exactly who that villain will be. There are two lines of speculation about this. One is that Cumberbatch will be stepping into the Ricardo Montalban role of Khan Noonian Singh, as Abrams has mentioned he likes the idea of the new films having symmetry with the original trilogy. The fact that Benicio del Toro was originally approached for the role lends credence to that, as does the early rumblings that we might see Spock die in the film (which would be a call-back to the original Star Trek 2.)
The other theory is that Cumberbatch will be playing Gary Mitchell, a character from the original TV series episode Where No Man Has Gone Before. That episode dealt with Mitchell contacting a strange alien energy that gave him superhuman powers, which would dovetail with the “one-man weapon” tease given for Into Darkness‘s villan, as well as a slip of the tongue from actor Karl Urban. However, co-writer Roberto Orci has publicly come out to deny that Gary Mitchell will be in the movie.
Whichever it may be, from this poster we can infer that Cumberbatch is going to wreck some serious stuff in the new movie, as he’s standing in in the middle of a blasted-out Starfleet logo looking out at a wrecked city, which most people are postulating will be on Earth. Star Trek: Into Darkness opens on May 17, 2013.