15 More Things You Didn’t Know About Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (1984)

2. Paramount Didn’t Like The Ending On Vulcan

Search For Spock
Paramount

Star Trek—The Motion Picture went famously over budget, and The Wrath of Khan went a bit over budget as well (it’s final negative cost was US $13 million), but Leonard Nimoy and Harve Bennett managed to bring The Search for Spock in on budget (and The Voyage Home a million bucks under budget), but Paramount reportedly wanted to cut one of the film’s biggest setpieces: the ending on Vulcan.

Paramount thought the ending would be too long, and the film should close right after the destruction of the Genesis Planet, with Spock coming around aboard the Bird of Prey, and a quick happy ending as the ship flies off into the sunset…probably leaving Sarek and Uhura as loose ends. Producer Harve Bennett and director Nimoy disagreed with this idea, and in the end they got to keep denouement with Spock getting his marbles back via the fal-tor-pan refusion ceremony.

Good thing too, because the proposed short-finish would have lacked weight and made the film feel like a TV episode.

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Maurice is one of the founders of FACT TREK (www.facttrek.com), a project dedicated to untangling 50+ years of mythology about the original Star Trek and its place in TV history. He's also a screenwriter, writer, and videogame industry vet with scars to show for it. In that latter capacity he game designer/writer on the Sega Genesis/SNES "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — Crossroads of Time" game, as well as Dreamcast "Ecco the Dolphin, Defender of the Future" where Tom Baker performed words he wrote.