Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan underwent multiple title changes, and Return Of The Jedi is partly to blame. After the exorbitant production budget and behind-the-scenes chaos of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Paramount decided to bring in a new creative team to helm the sequel. Producer Harve Bennett and director Nicholas Meyer were brought on with very specific guidelines to make a more exciting Star Trek movie for a lot less money.
Bennett and Meyer fulfilled their mandate, and then some. The Wrath Of Khan remains the gold standard of Star Trek movies; it was made for a fraction of the cost of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and became a critical and box office success. The showdown between William Shatner as Admiral Kirk and Ricardo Montalban's Khan Noonien Singh is a part of pop culture history, and re-energized the Star Trek franchise after the lackluster response to the first film. However, Star Trek II went through a difficult process to pick a title, as Paramount worried it might run afoul of that other science fiction institution, Star Wars.
How Return Of The Jedi Caused Star Trek II's Title Debacle
Meyer's original choice for Star Trek II's subtitle was The Undiscovered Country, but Paramount vetoed that idea, preferring something more direct. The Vengeance Of Khan was eventually chosen by the studio, and Meyer openly hated Paramount's pick. It was a pulpier title that announced to audiences that the highly popular villain from Star Trek: The Original Series would be returning. Despite Meyer's distaste for the title, it did the job Paramount wanted, but indecisiveness arose when it became known that the third Star Wars movie was to be titled Revenge Of The Jedi.
Paramount was looking to avoid both audience confusion and any acrimony with Lucasfilm over sharing such a similar title, so tweaked the name once again - this time to The Wrath Of Khan, which Meyer also hated. George Lucas would, of course, eventually decide the Jedi weren't interested in revenge after all, so renamed his film Return Of The Jedi, making the whole affair seem rather silly. Meyer would eventually have the last laugh, as he would direct the final TOS film titled Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
Why The Wrath Of Khan's Legacy Endures
No matter what Paramount called it, The Wrath Of Khan was an instant classic that saved a franchise on life support. After the cold, ponderous, visually drab Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Meyer's sequel rediscovered the classic character dynamics that made characters like Admiral Kirk and the Vulcan Captain Spock household names, and managed to make the characters even more compelling as they faced encroaching irrelevance in middle age. Spock's heroic death near the end of The Wrath of Khan is one of the most iconic scenes in the franchise's history, and set the stage for multiple successful sequels featuring the TOS cast over the next decade.
The Wrath Of Khan has become something of a template for large scale Star Trek storytelling, though copycat projects often borrow the wrong ideas from the film. It is easy to imagine beloved franchise entries like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds never getting off the ground had The Wrath Of Khan not made the vision of Gene Roddenberry relevant again. Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan may have had trouble picking a name thanks to Star Wars, but no matter what it was called, it was always destined to be one of Star Trek's finest moments.