2009–2016: Star Trek and worldwide recognition
In 2007, Pine turned down a role in a film adaptation of White Jazz to accept the part of James T. Kirk in the 2009 Star Trek film, which was released to critical and viewer acclaim in May of that year. That same month, he made a brief appearance promoting the film on Saturday Night Live with co-stars Zachary Quinto and Leonard Nimoy. During the rest of the summer of 2009, he appeared in the Los Angeles production of the Beau Willimon play Farragut North. Pine appeared in the Los Angeles production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore during the summer of 2010, for which he won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle's lead appearance award.
In the fall of 2009, Pine began work on the action film Unstoppable, directed by Tony Scott and written by Mark Bomback, which was released in November 2010. In the film, he played a young train conductor who helped a veteran railroad engineer (Denzel Washington) stop an unmanned, half-mile-long, runaway freight train carrying toxic liquids and poisonous gases from wiping out a nearby city. The Hollywood Reporter named Pine as one of the young male actors who are "pushing—or being pushed" into taking over Hollywood as the new "A-List."
In 2011, Pine sat down with William Shatner, the actor who originated the role of Captain Kirk more than 40 years earlier, for the feature-length documentary The Captains, which Shatner wrote and directed. The film had Shatner interview Pine about his career and how taking the role of Kirk felt.
Pine filmed the romantic comedy This Means War with Reese Witherspoon and Tom Hardy during the fall of 2010 in Vancouver. This Means War was released in February 2012. Pine voiced the character of Jack Frost in Rise of the Guardians. Pine co-starred with Elizabeth Banks, Olivia Wilde, and Michelle Pfeiffer in the family drama People Like Us, which was filmed in early 2011 and released in June 2012. He reprised the role of Kirk in the sequel to 2009's Star Trek, titled Star Trek Into Darkness, released in the US on May 15, 2013.
In 2009, Pine entered talks to play CIA analyst Jack Ryan in a reboot of Tom Clancy's novels. He starred in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which was released in 2014. Pine was the fourth actor to play the character, after Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck. In 2014, Pine was in talks to star in a thriller about the United States Coast Guard, The Finest Hours, released in January 2016. He guest-starred in Netflix's Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp and lent his voice for SuperMansion in 2015.
In May 2015, Pine was confirmed to play one of the Howard brothers along with Ben Foster in Hell or High Water (originally called Comancheria). After premiering at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, the film was released in August 2016. Clayton Davis of Variety found Pine's performance in the film to be his best, writing that Pine "shows his reserved range as a leading man." Pine reprised the role of Kirk in Star Trek Beyond. Filming began in June 2015 in Canada, and the film was released in the US in July 2016. Also in July 2016, he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance for his work on the series SuperMansion. That same year, Pine was featured on singer Barbra Streisand's album Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, in which the two duetted on a medley of the songs "I'll Be Seeing You" and "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face".
