No movie is going to be about exploring strange new worlds, or Paramount would be exploring strange empty box office receipts. That has to be left for the (hopefully) next series. The movies have to have action and a villain. Otherwise, you will lose viewers who we gained with this movie. And it can't retread the same story.
I don't mean any disrespect to you, but bullshit. That's the Hollywood party line, but it's simply untrue and it's the reason why we keep getting these cookie-cutter films out of the studios that are absolutely lacking in any substance.
Up until the release of this current film, what was the most successful of the Star Trek films, both in terms of box office and mainstream crossover appeal? It was The Voyage Home. In which there was no villain. No big action sequences. No battles. No retread of Wrath of Khan. None of that. In fact, Harve Bennet and Leonard Nimoy made that a key point of the film. And it worked brilliantly.
The movie was fun, it did spectacular box office for the time, it achieved great success beyond the Trek fanbase, and it even had a patented Star Trek social message thrown in. And to this day, it's the one non-fans will say "oh, I don't watch Star Trek, but I've seen the one with the whales" about.
Beyond that, look at any list of the top grossing films of all time. Sure, there's plenty of films with lots of action/adventure. But there's plenty of other types of films too. Just a quick look on Wikipedia gives me a list that includes E.T., The Lion King, The Chronicles of Narnia, Forrest Gump, The Sixth Sense, Ice Age: The Meltdown, The Passion of the Christ, Mamma Mia, and Night at the Museum in the top 50, among many others. And yet we can't have a variety of types of films that are successful at the box office?
Star Trek can and should do different types of stories. As I pointed out earlier, the six TOS films were not cookie cutter repeats of the same story. They were a wide variety of types of stories, all of which worked within the realm of Star Trek. It's when the TNG films tried to be too formulaic and not take risks that things went south.
The current Star Trek is a good, fun, exciting film. Now don't just duplicate it. Give us something equally fun and exciting, but in a different way. Try to do a carbon copy of the big action formula over and over again, and you're gonna drive this Trek into the ground too.