Here's how conventional Generations was.Apart from the cost for stuff like the crash and for guest stars (and even then, you could definitely do cheaper versions of most of the expensive stuff) I don't think you'd have to change pretty much anything. It's very like a TNG two-parter in a lot of ways. Many say that as a negative, I say it as a positive.
I have heard novelist Michael Jan Friedman speak at conventions about how he pitched the basic story of the film as an arc on the DC Comics Star Trek: The Next Generation comic during season seven and was told by Paramount Licensing, "Nope, don't do that, that's close to something the studio is doing."
I've never asked Mike how different his story was -- and I imagine it did not have Kirk in it -- but a weird space-time anomaly? Guinan's mysterious past? Picard and a time loop? Yeah, I can see all this, circa issue #60. The ingredients are all there.
