just had a thought about TMP in relation to the 70s disaster movies (Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Meteor etc ). the genre was like the superhero genre of today, all the stars had to be in them and they made crazy box office (e.g. Poseidon/Towering both made over 500m domestic when adjusted) . and disaster elements even filtered into other genre movies (Superman - opening on Krypton, Earthquake finale) like superhero movies are doing today (e.g. Trek Beyond being more Guardiansy, PG13 superhero Terminators, cinematic universes etc). Anyway was thinking TMP had maybe a slight intentional disaster movie leaning - like those movies theres a huge disaster movie threat in the face of a vast alien machine approaching earth destroying everything in its path, the all star cast (for a star trek movie Shatner/Nimoy equivalent to Newman/McQueen) is slowly assembled. the dangers along the way (wormhole, lightening bolts)..even a background doomed love story. Its almost like take away 'star trek' and its a futuristic space disaster movie with a group of advanced astronauts sent to deal with the impending disaster. also the trailers seemed to focus on the 'disaster' elements so maybe that could have helped bring the general audience in theatres as well as trek/wars/SF fans (think TMP is still the biggest trek movie worldwide when adjusted)
I can certainly see how they could have added some peril by using disaster movie tropes. The problem is that most disaster movies start with a wide cast and then gradually bump them off, and that wasn't so easy to do in TMP. Still, they could have included a couple of spare disposable crew, a captured Klingon vessel to explore and ally with, etc. It might have been fun.
I'd love to see a full-on 80's disaster movie on the Enterprise. Into Darkness and Beyond gave us cool modern big-budget glimpses at people running around a ship coming apart, and "Disaster" did it on a 90's TV budget. Kirk and company crawling through a ruined USS Enterprise trying to save the crew as the ship spiralled down to some planet would have been awesome.
Hmm... Interesting thought, but it's a reach. Shatner and Nimoy would hardly have been considered big stars at the time -- they didn't get a big star in a Trek movie until the second one. And disaster movies don't just rely on the threat of approaching disaster -- they actually show its spreading impact. I'm not sure erasing three Klingon ships and one listening post really gets that across. You want disaster-movie elements in a Trek film, I'd look more toward The Search for Spock, which is mostly set on a planet that's tearing itself apart, and that follows the standard disaster-movie formula where the signs of the threat become gradually evident and escalate to a full-on cataclysm in the third act. To a lesser extent, you could count The Voyage Home, whose first act involves an alien probe actually creating on-camera global weather disasters on Earth rather than just threatening to do bad things to Earth offscreen like V'Ger did. Generations with its supernovas has an aspect of that as well -- the kind of movie where the heroes have to stop a mad scientist who's creating natural disasters for his own ends. I guess maybe you could count the destruction of Vulcan in ST '09 and the gratuitous city-destruction porn in STID's climax, but those aren't really disaster films in their overall structure, just in those isolated sequences.
Not really a "disaster" movie idea, but my brother and I once worked out a story involving zombies taking over the TMP-era Enterprise NCC-1701 refit. The plot was set during the five year mission following TMP, and played out very similar to "First Contact", only with the TMP crew. All I really remember was that the ship was functioning on reserve power only, and that the bridge was accessed by Kirk and Spock at one point via a Jefferies tube leading up to an emergency hatch located right in front of the helm/navigation station (as described in "Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise") because the turbolifts were not working. We even turned off all the lights except a small desk lamp that night while writing, so that we could get an idea of the environment on the ship in the story.
I can see the influences, but I wouldn't call it a disaster movie. It's too thoughtful and low on action to be comparable. 70s disaster movies were all about the "OMG" moments and tugging at your heart strings as two thirds of the vulnerable and heroic characters slowly get bumped off in big set pieces.
Star Trek Insurrection is a disaster movie! In the sense it is really a disaster and should have never been made
I fancied doing a Trek themed zombie story. Miri was half way there. Instead I'm going to kitbash the plots of Babylon 5 and the Black Hole. ;-p