Paramount Pictures is expecting larger audiences to show up in May 2009 for "Star Trek XI," but it may have a bunch of competition, including a killing machine from the future.

"Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins" with McG at the helm and starring Christian Bale, is set to be released by Warner Bros. on May 22, 2009. That is just two weeks after "Star Trek" is set to premiere, crowding an already full genre calendar month in the movie theaters.

Also set to premiere just days before "Star Trek" is "X-Men Origins: Wolverine."

All of this could produce a rather difficult predicament for "Star Trek XI," which likely may force Paramount to change its release date again, or wait it out to see if Warner Bros. or Twentieth Century Fox plans to change their release dates.

Even if a high-profile genre film is not premiering for a couple of weeks later, Star Trek seems to have struggled to gain audiences at the theater. For the most recent film released in the series, "Star Trek: Nemesis" in 2002, the film opened just a couple of weeks before the "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," which had some analysts believe that the film -- which was one of the first in the series to not debut at No. 1 -- may have suffered tremendously as audiences usually geared up for a Star Trek film were instead looking ahead to the much higher profile Lord of the Rings.

The new Terminator film will come six years after the previous one, "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," which debuted in 2003 and earned $150.4 million in North America.