CBS/Paramount sues to stop Axanar

Didn't Wrath of Khan and the other original TOS movies all have pretty tiny budgets compared to most big blockbusters?

 

Yes-it was good for Wrath Of Khan (and ONLY for Wrath Of Khan)-not for any of the other movies in the series up to Nemesis. Making the Star Trek movies with the large budget provided for the 2009, 2013 and 2016 movies was a smart idea, and allowed them to do a lot more than what was done in the previous set of movies (Wrath of Khan to Nemesis); making the next ones on a small budget will only hurt the franchise, IMHO.

 

Some of his comments are ill-informned in terms of how much marketing muscle was applied to each film, and also how much a film has to make at the box ofiice to break even.

 

I'd say it also worked out pretty good for The Search for Spock, The Voyage Home, The Undiscovered Country, First Contact and Insurrection.

 

Sure. Except that there is no Axanar. So what Axanar proved is that - for a time - thousands of donors can be convinced to support the ambitions of one individual.
I'm sure Hollywood took notice.

 

^^^
What - like: "Producer embezzles studio production funds for personal use..." is a NEW story in Hollywood.

 

They made that movie for what would be 30 million dollars today. That's low budget sci-fi territory. Sunshine was made for about 27.2 million in 2017 dollars. Sadly, in the current climate, you're only going to see a movie like that in limited release. (Make The Shape of Water a wide release, dammit!!!)

Insurrection was the most expensive of the non-JJ movies, having about half the budget of Into Darkness when adjusting for inflation. Personally, from a purely visual standpoint, I think Nemesis got more bang for its buck, even though I do prefer the former over the latter.

@Everyone, I think tighter budgets tend to make tighter scripts, but it's a correlation, a tendency, not a guarantee. Going back to the Inception example, that movie cost less than Star Trek Beyond, but made twice the box office. (For all it's flaws, I actually liked Beyond. It's my favorite of the JJ-verse movies.)

 

"The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many"...

 

I think that the whole idea that less money and less time makes better art is overly simplistic. After all, videos with no money and five seconds weren't good enough to keep Vine alive. YouTube is littered with videos that are made with no money and only last a few minutes, and most of them have been viewed by a number so small you can fit them all in a van.

I think the real reason that shorter stories and videos tend to be better than longer versions of the same material is because the storytelling must make better use of its time. In other words, a time constraint can force you to be an effective storyteller. However, if you were to try to cram a Hero's Journey plot into 15 minutes, the result would be either an incomprehensible mess or a deliberately farcical, time-compressed riff on the Hero's Journey. What it would not be is a genuine, epic hero's tale, because you lack the time. Constraints can give, but they can also take away.

Constraints can be good so long as they don't significantly impede the art you're trying to create. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, those restraints can just as easily be crippling, or even an outright prohibition.

Also, I want to make this clear: An overabundance of run length and money didn't create the Axanar situation. Alec Peters did. Power can corrupt, but that's usually because it is sought by the corruptible.

 

There's an interesting passage in "The Making of Star Trek" where they talk about holding the line on props. It turned that sometimes custom props were not cost effective. The "instruments" in McCoy's medical pack were actually salt and pepper shakers that had such a futuristic design they weren't recognizable as such. I think it's reasonable to assume that some items we use in ordinary life won't change all that much or at least not so much as to be unrecognizable. Maurice is quite right that ordinary objects that look too contemporary can break the suspension of disbelief, putting unrecognizable objects in some cases could have the same effect. I've also found this true of sound effects in audio dramas. Sometimes you just take your best shot and hope for the best.

 

A lot of people fail to recognize that Commodore PET computer on Kirk's desk in "The Search for Spock." It's STILL what I think of when I think of a computer.

 

Well comparatively nothing. Every angle change usually meant adjusting the lights and moving the camera, which costs time. And in the photochemical days every shot cost $$$ because film and labs costs were expensive, so they only printed the takes they thought were going to be usable (this is why you sometimes hear them say "save it, please" on the TOS bloopers because they're making a note to print the blown take for a goody reel).

A few (maybe only two) of them were salt shakers obtained for "The Man Trap" which went unused because they wouldn't necessarily read as salt-shakers to the audience. The rest of the similar objects were just machined aluminum made by the metal shop to match.

I always took that as one of Kirk's "antiques".

 

Growing up in the 60’s, my mom & dad had almost-identical “danish” s&p shakers in the good-china hutch, along with a matching metal water pitcher. They were wedding gifts in 1957.

Day-to-day we dined off plates of the finest melmac.

 

No wonder they say "Melmac is really no place for cats".

 

TUC and FC had significant shortcomings. Insurrection was terrible. STIII/IV were decent, fun movies but neither aged well.

 

More cash would have significantly improved TUC. Would ST III and IV have "aged" better with higher budgets?

 

Some of the sets and effects might have benefited from more money, but I'm not sure how much impact that would have. I'm not sure they've aged any worse than the first two movies, though. All four of those movies are products of their time, but I don't think their age makes them unwatchable by any means.

 

I’ve always been more interested in what Meyer would have done in WoK with a larger budget, I think it would have looked considerably different if he wasn’t forced to use TMP leftovers (models, sets, etc.), it may have been much more Hornblower in space.

 

Imagine if Peters had more cash.






Oh, wait.....