I thought this might be fun. Here are 13 possible villains for the movie. It may be interesting to see how right or wrong some of us are. Instead of having multiple threads we can just have this one be the official villain discussion thread. My appologies if I missed someone you think should be on there.
I am going to take a guess and say Charlie X. He may have been abandoned by Kirk when younger then comes back as an adult to seeks his revenge and he does have super powers.
I went with Garth of Izar. Although I could've gone with Other. I imagine whoever Benedict Cumberbatch's playing will amount to a new creation. But they can probably use the Garth name for old canon recognition, and almost completely rewrite his past as they did to Kirk. There's probably more potential is improving a villain who wasn't all he could've been before. As apposed to rehashing a Khan or a Gary Mitchell, who are fan favourites and more risky to mess with. I bet in earlier drafts they wanted Khan though, and couldn't make the villain's motivation work as well, as a bad apple who just came from within Starfleet to begin with.
I think the majority of the evidence points to a reimagined Khan. I also think that it might be a red herring, but until they reveal his name or we see something that makes Khan impossible that's who I'm going with.
Gary is still in the lead for me, but I don't say that with absolute certainty, the fact they've kept the secret this well, this long is pretty amazing in this and age.
I'm discounting Mitchell and Khan right off the bat because they put blatant red herrings in the trailer to screw with people. I think the Dehner looking character is actually going to turn out to be Carol Marcus and they just included her in the trailer to make people who want to see Mitchell say "Hey, there's Dehner - it's gotta be Mitchell". They also included the hands touching glass scene in the Japanese trailer indicating it must be Khan because that happened in the last Khan movie! The people who cut this trailer are playing on expectations and rumors and doing a brilliant job of it. My guess is that it's actually a new character. Because why bother rebooting a universe if you're just going to tell the same stories? That said, if it is an existing character I think they'll go with Garth and change his story up significantly. He's a relatively unknown character and his episode, while memorable, wasn't the brilliant piece of work that Where No Man Has Gone Before, Space Seed, or TWOK were.
Thing is if it's a new character where's the Big Reveal in that? J.J. : "The villain of Into Darkness is SINBOTH THE HORRIBLE!" Fans: " "
lol - I kind of hope his name is Sinboth now... There is no reveal, but that's kind of the point. We've all been constructing this scenario in our heads that this HAS to be a character we've seen before. I think they're completely screwing with us by dropping all these hints. I guess MY point is that why does there have to be a big, jaw-dropping reveal? Why not enjoy a good, fresh villain?
I suppose it could be a totally brand new character but Bob Orci did say that Cumberbatch was playing a canon character. But then the thought occurred to me that the character can be a never before seen character and Orci's statement can still be true. People assume his statement means that the character was one seen on TOS because it's referred to as a canon character but he could be playing word games. If Cumberbatch is playing Joe Bob the Destroyer he can be considered being a canon character simpy by being in the movie.