They managed to successfully revive a dead franchise AND ram it right back into the ground within two movies. It was funny reading the rotten tomatoes score for Into Darkness, where the literally counted reviews saying "struggles on all parts and barely succedes as a sequel" as a positive review... That being said, that wasn't because Into Darkness was a bad movie (It wasn't). It was just mediocre movie. What killed the momentum was that we had to wait 4(!) years to get a sequel, starving anticipation, and then not delivering (domestically, even with added 3d it was much worse received than the first part).
Based on that, my predictions for Beyond:
- Beyond will be a better movie than Into Darkness. Maybe even better (at least more coherent) than Trek09
- But that won't please the critics. The "freshness" is gone, and this movie won't be total gamechanger, so they will rip it apart for both not being directed by JJ Abrams and not being new and different enough
- That being said, the 50th anniversary will give them some goodwill, and critics will highlight Anton Yelchin
-I guess most reviews will be on the barely-favourible side. Which means the Rotten-tomatoes score will be pretty high (better than Into Darkness, about the level as Trek09), probably about 90%. But since all those "positive" reviews will contain a lot of negatives as well, the Metacritic score will be tha worst of those three, maybe 60/100.
Audience reaction will be the best of them all, since they will just compare the quality of the movie with the other two, without setting it much in context about how much time has passed/how innovative it is compared to the other two at the time. Audience reaction (Imdb score?) will be much better than Into Darkness and maybe even better than Trek09, aka very good.
Final verdict:
Critics will praise Justin Lin for having a better handling of the characters, and it generally feeling more like the traditional Star Trek and being better at the quiter moments, but lacking the energy of JJ Abrams direction style, especially in the by-the-numbers action sequences. They will giving it the usual dwindling scores for sequels. Audience rating on the other hand will maybe the best ot the three, or at least as good as Trek09. Box office will be slightly better than Into Darkness domestic, but internationally much better than the previous two.
