• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

News They can't use stuff from ANY Trek movie!

F. King Daniel

Fleet Admiral
Admiral
Discovery writer Erika Lippoldt said in this interview:

Just because of the rights issue, we can’t use anything from the films, so that’s just something that we’re always aware of. ALL films, ’cause it’s a Paramount property, not CBS.

This is fascinating. Something there has been lots of speculation over regarding the Kelvin movies actually extends to content from ALL 13 films, which are owned by Paramount not CBS.

That means we'll never see Sybok, we'll never meet the Remans and I'm wondering if it might be the reason for the reimagined Klingons, whose bumpy head look and iconic ships (smooth grey TOS D7 aside) first appeared in movies I and III. Maybe it's even why the Klingon homeworld is "Qo'nos" in Discovery and "Kronos" in STVI (where the name originates) and Into Darkness??

Speculate away...
 
They had the Ceti eels in the finale, so they can apparently do easter eggs and references at least.
I think it's been spoken/referenced as Qo'noS and Chronos in the series, so maybe it doesn't apply to that as well?

I'm going to assume that specific character created for the movies are off limits though. So Carol Marcus and Admiral Marcus would be off the table.
 
In the comments to that article one poster claims that Alex Kurzman very recently said that this is bogus and they can use anything they want...can´t find a source though. Well..CBS and Paramount are thinking about a re-merger anyway...
 
No Saavik (although I doubt she was born yet), no young Admiral Cartwright. No volatile Praxis in orbit of Kronos/Qo'nos? No Deltans. No Kobayashi Maru.

No Captain Robau. No USS Kelvin.
 
that being the case, if there's no re-merger with Paramount, it might have been best to just create their own timeline instead. I can definately see now why they aren't doing a post Nemesis show though. Hard to get past that whole "There's no Romulus anymore" even if you did manage to avoid the "Have you seen Ambassador Spock" posters everywhere. In that regard if they felt compelled to do be in the prime timeline, it was between Enterprise and TOS or it was a Lost Era show.
 
that being the case, if there's no re-merger with Paramount, it might have been best to just create their own timeline instead. I can definately see now why they aren't doing a post Nemesis show though. Hard to get past that whole "There's no Romulus anymore" even if you did manage to avoid the "Have you seen Ambassador Spock" posters everywhere. In that regard if they felt compelled to do be in the prime timeline, it was between Enterprise and TOS or it was a Lost Era show.
Wow that's a good point. Unless they jumped forward decades and only ever referenced "New Romulus" they never could do a follow-up without referencing those events.
 
This sounds false. Star Trek Online is sitting right there, with both film and TV, stud from the films is already in the TV shows, the books happily get on doing both. A separate license is needed for the JJ films because of the bad robot involvement, but till now, CBS have the rights to everything, they own Star Trek. I think Erika might be mistaken, and the new enterprise sails too close to the refit, as well as the mentioning of the Vulcan Katra....definitely mistaken.
 
In the comments to that article one poster claims that Alex Kurzman very recently said that this is bogus and they can use anything they want...can´t find a source though. Well..CBS and Paramount are thinking about a re-merger anyway...
I saw or read this as well somewhere......maybe After Trek?
 
Honestly though, what is there from the movies, at least the earlier ones, that hasn't been referenced before in the tv shows. Seems like if it already made it into TV during the B&B era, they can reference it. Other stuff, well, did anyone really exect the whale probe to come up again (unless it was angry Gormaganders that went looking for humpbacks. I am trying to include the word gormagander in as many posts as possible. Gormagander. where was I.

I'd like to see that quote from Kurzman.
 
that being the case, if there's no re-merger with Paramount, it might have been best to just create their own timeline instead. I can definately see now why they aren't doing a post Nemesis show though. Hard to get past that whole "There's no Romulus anymore" even if you did manage to avoid the "Have you seen Ambassador Spock" posters everywhere. In that regard if they felt compelled to do be in the prime timeline, it was between Enterprise and TOS or it was a Lost Era show.
Romulus being destroyed is not a issue for any future tv-shows. First of all Romulus, or romulans would not even need to be mentioned. We went whole TNG era without any significant mentions of Andorians or Tellarites. And even if they needed to be mentioned they would not need to mention any reasons for why Romulus no longer exists. It just simply exploded off-screen as far as any new series is concerned.
 
that being the case, if there's no re-merger with Paramount, it might have been best to just create their own timeline instead. I can definately see now why they aren't doing a post Nemesis show though. Hard to get past that whole "There's no Romulus anymore" even if you did manage to avoid the "Have you seen Ambassador Spock" posters everywhere. In that regard if they felt compelled to do be in the prime timeline, it was between Enterprise and TOS or it was a Lost Era show.

Lost Era show would still be totally TMP based, no?
 
Seems like if it already made it into TV during the B&B era, they can reference it.
I'm not sure. Tiny little references may get under the radar (like what the novelverse has been doing since 2009), but I suspect that if it came from the movies first, it's a no-go.
This is completely contrary to what Kurtzman said only last week, link and discussion in this thread https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/q-a...season-2-and-the-finale.292838/#post-12361505

He said "there's no barrier" to using film stuff.
Here's the quote from your post:

First, there’s no barrier on what we can do in the show versus the films, and since the films are in different timelines we’re fortunate not to worry about that

That reads to me like he's speaking of Discovery not being beholden to in-universe events in the films due to them being their own timeline, not the legalities of the CBS/Paramount split.
 
Why I really hope CBS & Paramount become whole again. The fact that the Star Trek universe is divided like this is completely ridiculous to me. Several TOS and at least one TNG movie are actually important to the entire franchise.
 
Kurtzman would know better than Lippoldt.

A lot of design material and continuity used in the films prior to Abrams has already been used in prior Trek TV shows.
 
Last edited:
This claim must be in error, because movie elements have already been seen in DSC. The show uses Marc Okrand's Klingonese, which was invented for ST III. The movie pronunciation "Kronos" for "Qo'noS" has been used in the show, by Mirror Georgiou; they're just variant romanizations of the same place name anyway, like Moscow/Moskva.

Earth Spacedock from ST III was seen under construction in Earth orbit in the season finale. Also in the finale, Ceti eels were glimpsed in a frying pan in the Orion sector of Qo'noS. The Starfleet ship designs are heavily movie-influenced, especially the Enterprise. Discovery's own design is based on a rejected Enterprise redesign from an abandoned 1976 feature film project. There's a starship named the T'Plana-Hath, after the philosopher mentioned in ST III.
 
Of course, they also used a Starfleet emblem that's copyrighted by Franz Joseph Designs, without permission. So maybe they just got sloppy lawyers.
 
The Klingon make-up design, considerably refined beyond that of the early Trek movies, was used in five or six hundred TV episodes. There is no practical way or reason that Paramount would try to pursue a claim against CBS for this sort of thing, particularly given that their entire film series is derived from material owned now by CBS.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top