Will they go back to primeTrek after nuTrek finishes?.

It would seem to me that whether you give the audience what it wants or deliberately never give the audience what it wants, you are still defined by the audience.

 

Yeah, if anything like that were actually the filmmakers decision-making process you'd have a point.

 

Stan Lee was previously held up in support of said filmmakers as a shining example to follow.

 

I don't actually think that at all. I'm confused as yo why you would think that being a geek means you can't afford a moie ticket.

 

That's nice, and it has to do with...what?

 

No one said that.

I can afford a whole bunch of movie tickets. I'm not part of the target audience for any big-budget action-adventure movie.

 

Audience =/= fans, surely?

 

Star Trek is not just for Trekkies. It's for everyone.

It started out as a prime-time series on NBC for Pete's sake. It was never meant to be some cult thing accessible only to the cognoscenti.

 

Of course you can afford a movie ticket. I can afford to buy a movie ticket, too. The question isn't that. It's whether you, or I, can afford to buy $400M+ worth of movie tickets. The way the movie industry works, audiences are intended to be as large as possible. You get that, right?

I have to ask whether you get it, because you jumped to reading my remarks as if they're aimed at you personally, instead of grasping that movies are expensive to make, ergo they need to appeal to many people so they can be produced affordably.

If a movie only appeals to a small audience, it flops. That's from Hollywood 101.

 

Well, you can argue that Data is a modern-day riff on Frankenstein.

Okay, there was some serious topic drift going on there, but it did serve to illustrate the point that reboots, remakes, retcons and so on date back to the early talkies at least. So I'm not sure why people should be appalled at the very idea of rebooting STAR TREK.

People have been reinventing old stories for as long as there have been stories. This is nothing new or shocking.

 

Well with at least some social skills, and a father who isn't a complete jerkass.

 

Why should they? I don't think there's any going back.

 

...with Nerys Myk making the point that Stan Lee's quote is accepted by or should be applied by filmmakers in response to my suggestion that artists could listen to the audience and the fans among them to consider and evaluate what they have to say.

Not that I think quotes are inherently righteous just because they are quoted.

 

They are free to do so, of course, but they should never be expected to do so. Therein lies the difference.

 

Of course they are free. Expectations by others are irrelevant to free will. But according to Stan Lee, it should never happen at all, regardless of choice or expectation. And therein lies the difference with him.

 

Stan Lee has made a pretty good career out of not giving the fans "what they think they want."

But what would happen if "fans" got what they asked for? I'd bet real money that they still wouldn't be satisfied.

I'm pretty sure that's what he meant.

 

I've read a lot of Trek fanfiction. If the majority of that represents what 'fans' want, then I know I probably wouldn't be satisfied.

All Trek has its various problems, but it could be a lot worse if they let the inmates run the asylum. I know there are a lot of Trek writers that are fans, but there is a good reason why not every fan is a writer.

Also, just from looking around TrekBBS I'd say that quiet a few fans are happy with the NuMovies. If not the majority, then at least a pretty even split.

 

No, I get it.

 

I don't think it has to be an either-or thing, either. It's not like future films have to appeal to either the general public or to long-time Trekkies, but not both. nuTrek is appealing to both, although not universally. Not everyone in the general audience likes nuTrek, and not all long-time Trekkies like it either.

The point is, though, that it's not at all feasible to aim future films at long-time Trekkies as a primary goal. The primary goal has to be to appeal to a broader audience than that, or Trek is dead. And since Trek films are in competition with other films with broad appeal, that means future Trek films have to appeal to the broadest possible audience, period. The way I understand it, it won't be practical to finesse it any differently than that.

That means that within the parameters of broadly appealing films, appeal to long-time Trekkies can be further enhanced. It's just not the other way around. From here on out, long-time Trekkies will never get primary consideration to the exclusion of the general audience when it comes to seeing their preferences satisfied.

When it comes to estimating what the general audience really wants, being human, of course the filmmakers can err, but these guys are the professionals. I'm sorry, but us long-time Trekkies may be good judges of what we like, but we aren't good judges of what the general audience likes. The professionals tend to be much better at it. Me turning my nose up at movies that make over a billion dollars each is an example of that.

 

Plus, we should remember that it's not really a binary, either/or dichotomy: "the fans" versus "the general audience."

It's actually more like a spectrum, with the hardcore Trekkies at one end and the total newbies at the other end, and every subtle gradation of "fandom" in-between, from casual fans who have seen and enjoyed some percentage of the various movies and TV shows to the super-fans who have memorized every line of every show.

In real life, the vast majority of the audiences is not at either extreme, but at the top of the bell curve somewhere in the middle, with people who probably know what a Klingon is, but can't necessarily quote chapter and verse on every nuance of the Dominion War.

That's who you mostly need to appeal to.