Star Trek Concordance -- One More Time!

Too true.

I don't see this ending well.

Entertaining, but not well.

It's about characters from TOS, Robert. It would be like an Encyclopedia of Christianity not including Protestantism because the editor is Catholic, and feels P isn't "really' of the church.

It's Kirk and Spock. Maybe not "your" Kirk and Spock. But that's your issue.

 

A part of the concept behind the Concordance is being able to make it all fit together into one big happy continuity. Too much of Abrams' film is completely irreconcilable with what came before in order to even pretend it fits.

So, yeah, there'll likely be entries for the new movie, but they'll be separate from every other reference in the book, because any attempt to reconcile it with everything else is an exercise in futility. For example, I'm seeing "Spock Prime" being a completely separate listing from Spock.

And that size comparison chart that got Geoff Mandel fired? I want that.

 

Okay, short version. Mandel and John Eaves were some of the very few on the production staff for JJ's Star Trek movie that had any prior practical experience with Star Trek. The order of the day was to work up a picture showing the size of the new Enterprise. Mandel did up a picture comparing the new ship with the original one. JJ fired him on the spot, because it was clear he was "too attached to the old ship." Eaves made sure to keep him mouth shut from that point on.

Suffice it to say that my disdain for this movie extends to those who made it.

 

Man, there's nothing more entertaining than righteously offended fans of something.

 

I highly doubt JJ would've done the firing. If anyone, Scott Chambliss, the Production Designer, who's responsible for the art department, would've handled it.

 

Yeah, Mr "The old bridge looked like a couple of shoeboxes pushed together." He's also on my shit list.

 

Edit: you know what, never mind.

 

Yeah, me too.

 

What, you expect me to turn around on my stance on that lousy excuse for a movie just because of a gig? Can you imagine the amount of crap I'd get if I suddenly turned around and pretended everything was hunky dory with the thing?

Worry not, JJphiles, mine is not the final word on this, Bjo's is. Rest assured in the knowledge that JJ's film will be given fair treatment (even if that fair treatment means being sequestered in a special section in the back )

Otherwise, this'd be the cover...

 

"JJPhiles." Oy.

Yeah, I'm keeping my '76 edition. And my money.

Sorry, Bjo.

 

Vey.

 

Not exactly, but you need to suck it up, put what ever opinion you have behind you and accept that May 8th 2009 saw the most successful Trek film ever made released. Whether it was what you wanted is beside the point, what was made was made.

 

Even the '96 edition chronicled all appearances of TOS characters up to that point. Why shouldn't this edition?

 

It's still debatable just how much these characters still qualify as TOS characters; their personal histories are completely different, Chekov's age is off by several years, Spock is completely out of character, whether he's being played by Nimoy or Quinto, the ship is over twice the size of the original, the technology is wildly inconsistent, not only with TOS but with itself, etc.

Like I said, in all likelihood (unless Bjo came away from the film with a seriously bad taste in her mouth), it will be included, repeat, it will be included, but in an honest comparison with all of the previous material, you might not like the final result. And that's with as charitable an assessment as I imagine. The alternate timeline angle alone is enough to require it to be handled as a separate entity, like the Mirror Universe, so it's already on the road to being sequestered away from the rest of the canon.

 

Not that I want to come down on the side of the JJ Haters ('cause I thought the movie was decent, if not great), but how exactly are we defining successful? The movie spent at least 150 mil to make 385. It returned about the same profit per dollar as Generations did, and did it with movie tickets that cost nearly twice as much now as they did then. The new movie got fewer butts in seats than Wrath of Khan or even the Motion Picture did. JJ got Star Trek back on the scene, but let's not pretend the new movie made Trek insanely popular again.

 

It made more than X-Men, Night At The Museum, 2012, GI Joe, Sherlock Holmes, and Terminator, coming in at the 7th most popular movie, domestically, this year. Wrath of Khan was the 6th most popular movie that year. If you define TWOK as "insanely popular", I don't see how this isn't. Seems pretty equivalent to me.

(Which is not an argument for quality, so don't go there; I loved it, and I have lots of arguments for quality, but that isn't one of them. Your post was about popularity, and so is mine.)

If you think the 7th most popular movie of the year doesn't qualify as "successful", I don't know what to tell you.

 

I'm not arguing "successful", I'm arguing most successful. To continue with Wrath of Khan as the example, it made 97 million off a budget of 11 million. It made almost nine bucks for every dollar invested in it. Keep in mind, these are early eighties dollars too, I've not adjusted for inflation. JJs made 385 off of a budget of at least 150, which more than likely doesn't take into account the massive amount of marketing they did too. That's a take of around 2.50 for every dollar spent in the best possible scenario. Technically took in the most money? Absolutely. Adjusted for inflation? Not so much. Profitability? Doesn't even come close.

And this has nothing to do with TrekLit, so I should probably stop now.

 

That's not really a valid comparison, for two reasons. One is that movies spend far less time in the theater now than they did in 1979 or 1982. Those box office figures for TMP and TWOK were accumulated over many months. The other reason is that movie attendance in general is less these days, since movies are a smaller piece of the multimedia pie and the audience is more fragmented.

Okay, overall for 2009 it was the 7th top-grossing film domestically. But compare that to its predecessors. For their respective years:

NEM: 54th place
INS: 28th
FC: 17th
GEN: 15th
TUC: 15th
TFF: 25th
TVH: 5th
TSFS: 9th
TWOK: 6th
TMP: 4th

(Courtesy of Box Office Mojo, except for the TMP figure, from Wikipedia.)

So at the very least, the movie has made ST more popular at the box office than it's been in the past 23 years. It's restored a high profile to a franchise that had come to be seen as irrelevant by the general public.

 

Who cares about dollars earned per dollar spent? If you spend a dollar and make 235 million and one dollars, that's shocking and extremely cool, but if you spend 150 million and make 385 million, you're still 235 million dollars richer.

And besides, larger overall profit doesn't just mean the movie did well, it means there's increased visibility for all kinds of ancillary sales. I bet Star Trek toys sold a hell of a lot better this Christmas than they had in a while, don't you think?

It's more or less impossible to define "most successful", but given the incredibly negative buzz for the franchise as a whole after Nemesis and Enterprise, it certainly ranks among the highest from any reasonable perspective. So either way, Dimesdan's point is pretty inarguable.