For that investment? They got about nothing back. The blu-rays basically bombed. Despite being awesome.
TNG-R was made that way, on a ''prediction of earnings'' that didn't materialise out of Blu Ray sales, at least. It backfired big time.
I do wonder about the conviction and certainty with which people proclaim these kind of things, when I don't remember any kind of official comment from CBS about TNG-R's performance. Even Robert Meyer Burnett surely never tweeted anything about TNG-R "bombing" or "backfiring". So where does all of this come from? I'm not necessarily saying you are wrong, but what makes you think you are right?
1000 times this.
Lance, Frontier -- seriously; I know we're not talking about matters of life or death here, but every time a discussion comes up about what a future DS9-R project could look like or the circumstances under which it very well could happen, you shut it down with "It's gonna cost $20 million and TNG-R was a flop and CBS is a business and it's never gonna happen and deal with it." This is the kind of thing that gets Marc Cushman (rightly) slagged off for in his TATV books. Not that it's perfectly germane to a DS9-R project, but with respect could you please provide some objective sources for your information on the costs and performance of the TNG-R project (the BD portion of it will do)?
As to the performance of TNG-R on BD, based on professional experience I can
100% promise you that CBS would never,
ever gamble millions of dollars (and I personally think that $20 million figure is high) deficit financing a project like TNG-R on the backs of fans who will pay hundreds of dollars for action figures and model kits on the secondary market but won't pay a buck or two for an episode of a new series. Not in 2011 and not now. To do so would get any CBS exec laughed out of the room. And make no mistake, TNG-R on BD was geared primarily to the Trek fan base due to the very good but comparatively low-budget VAM. This is why BD was always an important but quite short-term portion of the TNG-R project. Various participants in the BD project (Burnett, the Okudas, et al) may subjectively deem it a "failure", but CBS have not lost money on TNG-R -- not by a long shot.
I can only attribute much of what I read around here to fan self-importance, specifically this: "We (the fans) told CBS what we wanted from TNG-R, CBS delivered but had the unmitigated gall to charge
$50-60 per season (strictly speaking CBS could mostly only control the admittedly inflated MSRP, not the street price but you get the idea), we told 'em to pound sand and showed them!" Of course that's still $2-2.50 per episode not counting the VAM; how reasonable that is is up to the individual customer, but it almost certainly reflected the cost of the project and CBS' sales expectations for the BDs.
These guys aren't dummies. CBS know Trek fans talk out of both sides of their mouths. "You build it and we will come" isn't going to happen; it hasn't happened for decades. The current situation is the very embodiment of "This is why we can't have nice things." Everyone should spend their hard-earned money how they see fit of course, but they shouldn't think they're going to influence the future of Trek by spending it all on cosplay and turning up their noses at a new subscription-based streaming series. The fans don't matter, we don't matter, the mass market does, and the mass market's all about streaming right now, not BD. It also means more lowest-common-denominator action / adventure-oriented content at the expense of thought-provoking sci-fi, but that's a whole different story.