Star Trek 4 Reportedly Shelved

Paramount was incredibly incompetent in their handling of the films. Trying to blame Star Wars is just blame-shifting, probably started by Paramount.

 

Damn right. 4 year gap for a sequel that bastardizes the most popular Star Trek film, then follow up with a 3rd movie made in a rush for the 50th anniversary that you don't even promote in your shitty marketing campaign. Just pathetic. If they had played their cards right after 2009, bring in the Star Trek equivalent of a Kevin Feige, Trek could be a Guardians of the Galaxy level franchise. Maybe not make quite as much, but pull in $450-500 million each, then maybe another 40-60 million on Blu-Ray + streaming rights.

 

The point as I understand it of the Forbes article is that more movie Trek isn't needed. It was just a filler til Star Wars returned. I don't fully agree with this, Trek and Wars have similar but different fan bases. Trek historically wasn't a Star Wars substitute, it had its own fan base, themes, values, vision, etc. But perhaps Abrams made it into a substitute for some sci-fi fans.

 

The sad thing is, the Kelvin crew are strong enough to carry lower budget adventure. They're in the public conciousness. When they reboot again, we won't automatically care about nununuSpock and friends.

 

Agree to disagree on this one. I think Abrams delivered an exciting movie, and was able to look at the dynamics of the TOS crew and explore how those relationships might have come to be.

 

I liked Trek 09 and ITD too, but I always had the feeling the franchise would be affected down the road, because of the way so many things were compressed and rushed and how the crew was put together.

I wasn't too big a fan of making Kirk captain and the cadets instant officers at the end of the movie, because I knew that would mean they have to rush and skip over a lot of other things, which they kind of did.

We get a mention of an off screen Harry Mudd incident, but that's all. Sulu was put in command in STID, but in the first film a year earlier, he was a cadet who forgot how to get the Enterprise into warp, until Spock told him what to do.

For me, the end result was that the franchise felt a little too empty. A lot of action, but not enough filler-everything happened too fast, maybe too fast for the movie going audience.

It leaves the question of, is all this happening Paramount botched a lot of stuff with bad marketing and waiting too long and such, or did the audience lose interest, or was it both?

 

The audience lost interest because of botched timing. This is a day and age where if you want a franchise it is at maximum two year wait, and preferably within a year. 4 years was way too long to keep public interested.

 

Abrams was trying to throw in humor with that scene. He was copying a scene from TESB. But the joke didn't hit, even for sci-fi fans that knew what he was doing like me. It just made Sulu look stupid.

 

You don't think his hiring had anything to do with his previous association with Star Trek?

 

I thought the point of that scene was to show he was nervous, to emphasize the incredible honor and responsibility of being assigned the Enterprise.

 

Agreed. There is absolutely no reason Paramount can't have success with Star Trek, the key is to keep the budget modest and to manage their expectations. The reason I mentioned a remake of the Ultimate Computer earlier is because it could be set almost entirely on existing sets. They need to think more creatively. Maybe strike a deal with CBS to use the Discovery sets, re-configured and redressed as the interior of the 1701-A, I don't know.

The problem is Paramount thinking they could turn Star Trek into Star Wars (even that article posits Into Darkness was meant to replicate the success of the Dark Knight, which was a billion dollar crowd pleaser).

The $467M it earned SHOULD have been enough if the budget had not been nearly $200M.

 

The problem with Paramount is a complete lack of courage and maybe some cronyism on top. They refused to bring in new blood. Even with Beyond, JJ was already on the way out to Star Wars but they decided to start promoting the underlings instead of taking that as a sign to bring in someone completely new. Then CBS clings to JJ's leftovers and doubles down with Alex Kurtzman. They need a completely new caretaker of Star Trek with NO...PRIOR...AFFILIATION with Bad Robot. Fuller doesn't count because he wasn't really the true head and he flamed out.

 

I think if you go back a few years to when 09 was released, people on here were even predicting it back then. They waited 4 years for Into Darkness, which also had bad marketing with the Khan/Harrison thing, which was just too long. It should've been a sure fire hit.

 

Agreed. Star Trek was never going to be Star Wars, especially in terms of box office. Paramount definitely doesn't know how to handle this franchise.

 

They were exciting, I agree. Though the movies didn't have any good Spock/McCoy interaction until after JJ left.

 

But, I don't need good Spock/McCoy banter. I appreciated the journies the characters went in these films.

 

I found out Beyond was out by accident a few months after it actually premiered. By googling it. I had no idea it was out. It was one of those 'hey, aren't they supposed to release a Trek movie around this time?" thing.

One time I was watching STID on TV during the scene when Kirk leaves the ship and leaves Sulu in command. Then it hit me; a year prior Sulu was a raw cadet who didn't even know how to get the ship into warp. Now he's third in command - that would mean the whole ship had to be full of recent cadets.

It was really meant to be funny (it was a little funny) the problem is, once I realized this difference, I just took it the wrong way. The credibility to the whole thing just wasn't there. Everything just felt really, really rushed.

Maybe if they showed enough material where they gradually ease Sulu into the role it would go down better, but that's the problem. It's only second movie and all the characters were plugged into their roles instantly.

Same thing when Spock yells "Khannnn!", I just couldn't get into it, because it felt like there was nothing in between to justify it. Everything had been compressed and smashed together too quickly.

 

https://trekmovie.com/2019/01/10/jo...OYTE71CbQsKgvhm5RDuqFcLriyXo479_NaC0CehMFiGAs John Cho seems to think it could still happen .

 

Wasn't Into Darkness the very first time Sulu was placed in command? I presume Scotty would be the usual 3rd in command, but he'd quit at that point with Keenser.

Don't get me wrong, the idea that a group of cadets remain on in command of the flagship is goofy, but it's just one of those goofy things we accept... like the bridge being a massive obvious bullseye, or the captain beaming down into danger with most of the senior staff. YMMV.

 

Good catch. Scotty had quit and was off the ship so that may have been why Sulu was put in charge. I'm still trying to figure Kelvin Scotty out. He's like a half serious, half mad scientist, half comedian type. My original thought was they just skipped over him and let Sulu command.

Still, all of that made me think the entire ship was run by recent cadets - Uhura is the chief com officer, Chekov took over as chief engineer for Scotty, Sulu is 3rd in command. I basically just looked the other way, but still had a feeling it might affect the series down the road.