Attack the Block director Joe Cornish is in the frame to direct the next Star Trek movie, the third in the recent series of reboots masterminded by JJ Abrams. Due to his commitments on Star Wars, Abrams recently confirmed he would not return to direct Star Trek 3 despite the success of the second instalment, Into Darkness, and Cornish has now emerged as the frontrunner to replace him, according to Deadline.

Cornish made waves with his 2011 debut, Attack the Block, which rose above its relatively limited budget of £8m to pull off some impressive special effects sequences. Though he has not directed since, he secured writing jobs on major Hollywood productions The Adventures of Tintin and Ant-Man, directed by Steven Spielberg and Edgar Wright respectively. He is also working on an adaptation of Neal Stephenson's dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash.

Star Trek 3 is due to begin shooting in the middle part of 2014.

Meanwhile, Abrams himself has been elaborating a little more his vision for the much-hyped Star Wars Episode 7, which is aiming at a 2015 release. In an interview with the Times, to promote his book S, he suggested he was not going to be enslaved by Star Wars' increasingly labyrinthine mythology.

"If you watch the first movie, you don't actually know exactly what the Empire is trying to do," Abrams said. "You don't know what Leia is princess of. You don't yet understand who Jabba the Hutt is, even though there is a reference to him ... The beauty of that movie was that it was an unfamiliar world, and yet you wanted to see it expand and to see where it went."

Having told a conference in the summer he intended "honouring but not revering what came before", Abrams appears to be preparing the ground for a film unfettered by Star Wars' past, not unlike his 2009 Star Trek reboot.

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