What sunk the TNG movie franchise: Insurrection or Nemesis?

I was at the store today and saw some poor bastard buying the three Bay Transformers on dvd. Wanted to shake him violently and yell the names of some good movies for him to watch instead.

 

The FACTS are that Nemesis graded rather well with audiences. My previous post mentions Insurrection probably decreased expectations for a STNG film. If more people had ventured out to see it, I think the lack of BO take in first run theaters wouldn't have been as much of an issue.

 

Surprisingly I enjoyed Transformers1. I dont apologize for it. It is what it was meant to be. Star Trek is a better movie on every level though...do you see Transformers getting a Writer's Guild Award nom?? ST09 did...

 

What "facts" are these?

That doesn't make any sense. If more people had gone to see it, the BO take would have been higher.

 

I actually find them to be quite similar. TF1 and ST11 both share a "something happens because the script says so, regardless of logic" mentality that gets swept under the rug to a certain extent in the name of fun. That said, ST11 is easily the better film. Abrams vs Bay? No contest.

No apologies for TF2 though. What a mess. (TF3 was just as bad, but can't blame that one on K&O. )

 

honestly what sunk the TNG movie franchise was the TNG tv franchise in its whole (meaning DS9 and VOY). DS9 gave us some great encompassing arcs and stories. it always had a feel of something huge going on in the galaxy. generations, first contact, and insurrection all are pretty much self contained. first contact is the closest it comes to being a big story, but in the end in boils down to one/two men and their pasts/futures.

never release ds9 and voy, turn ds9 war stories into a trilogy for tng and we'd probably have spinoffs of those movies still on tv today.

 

Box Offcie Guru:

In other words, people who went to actually SEE it liked it.

The comment was based off of my last post...IE: IF ST Nem had better expectations due to Insurrection's performance.

 

What does this even mean? What's the science behind this statement?

Is it referring to a scientific poll of the general audience who saw the film, and then is that A- an amalgamation of the grades assigned by those polled who self-identified as Star Trek fans? If that's what it was, then what was the grade assigned by everybody else?

Or what?

Link, please?

 

Just keep telling that to yourself.

 

Transformers as coming of age drama is not that far off from Kirk being a rebel without a cause and driving his car off of a cliff. Some of the humor in Transformers is not that different from the slapstick with Scotty in the brewery-engine-room. Adolescent intrigue between Shia and Megan Fox is not that different from Kirk getting in bar brawls or escapades in the academy or Spock and Uhura in the turbolift. And of course, the visual style with sh*t wizzing past the camera is pretty much the same. Not to mention we're dealing with trying to revive two preexisting franchises. I mean, there was a reason those guys were chosen to write Trek in the first place. It was because they write popcorn fluff movies that make tons of money for films that get, at best, grudgingly lukewarm reviews.

The reason TF1 was actually watchable was that it was basically a testosterone-laden E.T. with a big fight tacked on at the end. And of course, whenever Peter Cullen speaks as Optimus, it always seems epic, but that's about him, not his script. You could say the same thing about Nimoy's cameo.

 

Here, let me Google that for you.

 

The 7.9/10 average rating that Star Trek (2009) gets from the Top Critics at Rotten Tomatoes is better than "grudgingly lukewarm" [http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_trek_11/]. Further, if not all of them rated it the exactly same, then at least one of them thought it was even better than that.

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Thanks, but what's there doesn't exactly shed any light on anything, does it. The article there cites only home page links to Exhibitor Relations and EDI for where its data comes from. No answers.

 

Okay, how about Underworld and Tom Swift?

 

Ebert gave it two and a half stars. That's about what it deserves. It was fun to watch while you're in the seats but you forget about it within minutes of the lights coming up again. To be fair, I felt the same way about Insurrection being forgettable, with the added insult of it being dull.

 

No problem. A little more Googling gets us to the CinemaScore website which has the following information on the "About Us" page:

 

This is based entirely on speculation and hearsay, neither of which is factual.

 

Personally, I think that's about the right way to rate Star Trek (2009). My caveat there is that I rate most Trek films worse than that! Consequently, the 2009 film is in my top three Trek films.

Clearly, however, some critics thought it was better.

 

OK. Thanks for that. That is more helpful.

It still doesn't answer the basic question I had, though, which is why did the quote from boxofficeguru.com grammatically say that it was the fans that gave it an A-. It's a poorly written sentence, then.

It should just simply say that the CinemaScore was A-, and leave it at that, if that's what they meant.

Any inference about what fans thought is, in that case, totally unsupported by the data.

 

Agreed. CinemaScore knew some simple demographics about respondents, but probably didn't include any questions like, "Are you a fan of the series?"

Or did they? There's no way to tell from here. I'm done pestering Google tonight.

 

I think it started earlier than Insurrection and Nemesis.

When I first watched Generations on VHS, I thought it was the beginning of the end of the TNG franchise. Generations seemed like a mediocre extended two-part episode. I didn't have any high expectations for further TNG movies.

When First Contact came along, I was pleasantly surprised as to how excellent it was.

By the time Insurrection came along, I was disappointed in how it went back to resembling a mediocre extended two-part episode. When Nemesis came along, I really didn't care anymore.