Star Trek Prime Universe Megafranchise

Star Wars fans, excepting those in deep denial, have been well aware of that for decades, and with the Disney sale and the ST it has only been made that much more obvious. The films have always disregarded or overwritten things from the EU, even in the OT days.

 

The one thing that got me through realizing that the characters and situations from the Star Wars EU would be erased by Episode VII was Star Trek.
I ignore most of the Trek EU as it is, so why couldn't I do it for Star Wars too? Well, that and the fact that I also felt that the SW EU had gotten too busy, started suffering from small universe syndrome, and had written itself into a hole even before they jumped the shark with the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, and again with every series that followed. So now I'm excited about it.

I digress to the OP; I hope that Star Trek never falls into the Marvel version of a mega-franchise. I find it's easier to have each series never give each other more than a passing mention and cameos. Having all of Star Trek occur from multiple fronts at once is a ticket to franchise exhaustion and possibly franchise death. Heed my words, the Marvel mega-franchise will run itself out long before they are able to get the X-Men and Spider-Man back. Avengers 3 will be where it becomes obvious that it has officially run out of steam.

 

I'm expecting it much sooner than that. IMO, the Marvel movies only have another year or two before they burn themselves out.

 

It took quite a while for the public to get tired of the Prime Universe, and I don't think the Marvel Universe will last as long. Partly because Marvel will have no qualms about immediately rebooting the whole thing the moment it becomes necessary.

 

I don't know. I think it took quite a while for fans to get tired of the Prime universe. But, TV ratings suggest the general public started drifting away from it the moment TNG was over.

 

Exactly so.

It's unusual - or used to be - for a sequel or spin-off from a hit TV series to do as well as the original. To most people, later Trek shows were just TNG spinoffs - most of TNG's viewership was not into Trek before TNG, and without the TNG cast they were attached to later Trek shows held no strong appeal for them.

 

True, but TV ratings in general show that network TV has declined a lot since the 80s. I'm guessing that if none of the TNG spinoffs happened and TNG continued that a similar decline would have happened, albeit probably not as pronounced.