10 Star Trek Twists That The Actors Hated
8. Captain Kirk Falls To His Death - William Shatner
When the seventh Star Trek film was going into production, the executives at Paramount knew that they wanted The Next Generation crew to be the main focus. The reason for this was two-fold. First, their show had recently wrapped, with its seven seasons proving extremely popular with the fanbase. Capitalizing on this seemed like common sense.
The other reason for this was that the salaries that The Original Series' cast now commanded were simply too high. So, Generations was seen as a passing of the torch. Initially, Kirk, Spock and McCoy were all to appear. DeForest Kelley and Leonard Nimoy did not appear for various reasons, though William Shatner did. This, he said, was because he was given a fairly poor set of choices.
Appear, and die.
Don't appear, and die.
Naturally, he took the role to ensure a measure of control over the part, even though he was unhappy with it. He did receive slight script revision rights and the opening skydive scene, which was later deleted, was written and filmed at his insistence. He wanted to show that Kirk was obsessed with living. In the end, the filming only really showed him dying.