Entertainment Weekly 'Almost Human': J.J. Abrams answers 8 burning questions *If this has been posted elsewhere - I apologize (couldn't find it)
CBS Translation - Once the Paramount Star Trek contract expires with Bad Robot a new series will be on the air ASAP!!
"when the time is right" sounds like a plain polite "not now" to me, nothing to do with J.J.'s movies whatsoever.
Yup. Basically, they don't want to see Trek on the air anytime soon and no one has pitched anything either. Maybe 5 years from now in the years following the completion of his trilogy a new director or team will be given a new look and themed Trek based show to helm but not before then.
This is how I read it. I'm sure all the networks do market studies to find out what people want to watch. I think if outer space adventure series was high on the list, we'd already have a new Star Trek series.
How is it possible that Star Trek lasted so long on tv (via various series) and yet now that Star Trek is just about as famous and popular as it's ever been worldwide, they don't think a tv show would work right now?
I'd imagine that with seven-hundred plus hours of material, there is the question of whether or not enough people would be interested in watching new weekly adventures. I'm a huge fan and I'm really not interested in seeing it return to TV.
Well that's incredibly disappointing. The films are decent enough entertainment to pass the time, but Star Trek belongs on television.
Overextending yourself doesn't seem to be a problem for Marvel. Two films every year and a TV series (with 4 more coming) on the air. Star Wars is also planning a film every year and the animated series "Rebels". Even Doctor Who had three series airing simultaneously with no ill effect. Star Trek's offerings seem quite paltry in comparison.
Will the Marvel properties be as popular or even going ten-years from now after three or four TV series and twenty movies? There's such a thing as going to the well too many times.
I had seen it said elsewhere that CBS just wasn't interested in creating a series while the movies were current. That was the response to various pitches in the last few years. I don't know if that's accurate, but it makes some sense. Star Trek isn't exactly Marvel popularity-wise. And even if they were, they'd be running into the problem that the Star Wars live action has run into. It just costs too much to make a TV sci-fi space show. That genre seems to belong to movies nowadays. Anything on TV might seem too cheap by comparison. That said, I'd rather Star Trek be on TV than in movies. I am not as interested as much by current movies as I am with current TV. Star Trek would have more time to develop the characters instead of cramming them into an FX extravaganza.
Really? How many space movies have we had in the past year? There's STID. There's Ender's Game. There's Prometheus, which was far from successful. There's Riddick, which didn't do much better. There's Elysium, which was set mostly on Earth. There's Gravity, which was a different kind of space movie. There's Europa Report, which was very low-budget. Maybe you could make a case for Man of Steel being marginally a space movie because it spent so much time on Krypton in the first act, but that's a reach. So yeah, there have been some, but the majority of SF movies lately have been set on and around Earth, even films involving aliens (The Host, The World's End, Pacific Rim) or post-apocalyptic futures (Oblivion, Elysium, After Earth). So I'm not sure I'd say that movies "own" the genre, given how little they've embraced it. And Europa Report proves it doesn't require a big budget to do a compelling space story.
It's impossible to say, but Disney's counting on it. CBS is taking a more conservative path with Star Trek.
Translation: we have 7 shows with better ratings than agent of shield. All made at a fraction of the cost. Get back to us when star trek will out draw what we already have.
I didn't say that they make a ton of space movies or that it's widely embraced, just that if you're going to see that genre in live action, it's far more likely to be in movies than on TV. And that's going to be the case for Star Trek for at least three more years, if not more.
I just don't see that. We've had plenty of space shows on TV in the past, and we've got Doctor Who today. The FX technology for TV has gotten sophisticated enough to give us the alien landscapes and outer-space action of Who, the futuristic settings and technologies of Continuum and Almost Human, and the like. The reason there are few space shows today isn't lack of technological capability, it's just that tastes and styles have shifted in another direction in recent years. And I have heard about a few space-based series in development for next season, including Bryan Fuller's High Moon for Syfy.
$403.3 million against a $130 million budget, with a sequel in development, sounds fairly successful to me. $93.6 million against a $38 million budget isn't bad. Not a blockbuster, by any means, but at least a break-even showing. These don't undermine your point; they're just me being picky while I wait for a PDF to convert at work...
^Well, all I seem to hear about Prometheus is negative. I thought it was a widely hated film. But I just checked Rotten Tomatoes and it's at 74%. Weird.