‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ opens today in the US and is already being poised to reach $100million by the end of the weekend. With what looks like a successful sequel following a highly prosperous reboot, it may seem surprising to hear that director J.J. Abrams was not a ‘Star Trek’ fan.

During an appearance on ‘The Daily Show’ with Jon Stewart, Abrams made this shocking confession:

“When I was a kid, I never liked ‘Star Trek’. Growing up, honestly, I could never get into it. My friends loved it and I would try. I watched episodes but it always felt too philosophical to me.”

In fact, Abrams wasn’t even a fan when he was making his first ‘Star Trek’ film!

“Some of the writers [on the film] loved ‘Star Trek’. I was not really a fan and my producing partner never saw it… This movie (‘Star Trek Into Darkness’) that we did, the goal was to make a movie for movie goers not just for ‘Star Trek’ fans.”

Ouch! Way to alienate a whole franchise of movie goers Abrams! Naturally, we had to side with Stewart when he replied after that comment, “The interesting thing to me was, I stopped listening to you when you said you didn’t like ‘Star Trek’.”

Abrams did try to backtrack at bit and stated that he really meant that Stewart and his kind (they are called Trekkies, Abrams!) were much smarter than he was as he “didn’t get” the show. However, since he’s worked on the movies, he’s gone back to watch the series and states he loves it now. It seemed there was balance in the force until the director commented that ‘Star Wars’ didn’t seem sci-fi to him yet the ‘Star Trek’ series did, so he set out to make ‘Star Trek’ less sci-fi so as not to suffer from the sci-fi label stigma.

Anyway, it would be interesting to get Neil deGrasse Tyson and Abrams together to hash it all out, don’t you think?

You can watch the segment of ‘The Daily Show’ where Abrams talked about the two franchises below. Let us know what you thought about Abrams rather revealing confession in the comments below.

 

Source: Deadline