This is the kind of thing that kinda raises an eyebrow from me. The degree to which Trek was a "niche product" is vastly overstated; if it were really the case, there would have been no motivation for a reboot at all. Trek's audience contracted to a "niche" throughout the Nineties only because it became a tired product to which only a fraction of the hardcore fandom was dedicated by the end... but there was still a vast audience out there who knew who Kirk and Spock and company (or Picard and Data and company) and would come out to see a product done right. That the latter Trek shows never really had such cachet, or that the TNG movies did relatively little with the cachet that show had enjoyed (and even there the "general audience's" absence seems to be a going assumption even where the "general audience" plainly did come out, such as First Contact ) doesn't imply the brand as a whole was simply "niche." And the immense goodwill Abrams' reboot enjoyed despite its evident flaws rather speaks against that assumption.
A real "niche product" was something like Iron Man, which had nowhere near the level of pop-culture penetration Trek as a brand has enjoyed since forever. And even that, given sufficiently sophisticated treatment and a charismatic star, found its way with this exotic "general audience" that supposedly needs to be repeatedly educated about what genre content is. And that's to say nothing of products which had no prepared "niche" to build from, like Avatar or Inception or Interstellar, all of which did bigger box than NuTrek on their own merits as movies. I'm just not buying it at all. (Nor the often-related meme that the choice is between pleasing the fans and finding a general audience.)
Last edited:
Perfect.
