Forbes article: ‘Snake Eyes’ Box Office Failure Is Terrible News For ‘Star Trek’

What are those assessments?

 

Sequel took too long. Sequel wasn’t beloved like the first (Beyond following that with it underperforming from the start is telling). Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy eventually taking that space opera blockbuster thunder away from Trek. And now here we are, 12 years later and haven’t gotten a new installment in five years, and with COVID who knows what Trek’s future in movie theaters will be.

I know if I was running Paramount I would pretty much cancel any Star Trek plans and declare the movie division of that franchise dead a doornail. But that’s just me, and be glad I’m not running Paramount.

 

Thank you.

That's (almost) all just nonsense, though.

Star Wars sat out for 16 years, so time between sequels is irrelevant. Also, Ghostbusters III is about to come out. Will GB3 perform well? Who knows, but I'm going to guess that it's going to depend in part on whether people enjoy it and want to see it again, not about how long its been between sequels or whether thunder has been "stolen."

STID actually made more at the box office than STXI, about $80M more. So it being not as beloved as STXI is, to put it mildly, a suspect claim.

I said it was (almost) all nonsense, but the part about COVID isn't, except that it's not a problem particular to the Trek franchise.

None of this is to say that nuTrek is coming back. But brilliant insights, those aren't.

 

That’s false equivalency. Those examples aren’t just new sequels but new iterations with young new casts reigniting franchises that had been put on hold after more or less a decade. In fact, I’d put ST09 right up there with them as a glowing example of reignighting a franchise.

Now, if the upcoming Star Trek film is going to be a brand new cast and dynamic, then maybe it’ll have a chance of reigniting the film franchise in a similar way ST09 and The Force Awakens did.

The increase is actually due to the studios strengthening their international distribution ever since AVATAR set the world on fire. If you actually look at the domestic gross, it did LESS business than ST09, and that’s with the benefit of 3D and IMAX screenings, which ST09 didn’t have. So to say STID was slightly more popular is a suspect claim, especially given how BEYOND did not seem to benefit from that.

Definitely. We’re in uncharted waters, so who knows how much money studios are willing to put in their tent pole films when $700m is (for the moment) as good as it gets. Unless you’re a Chinese release.

 

I'm not going to address the other points in the context of shifting goalposts, but, regarding this one, maybe it's just simply that part of the potential audience thought that BEY wasn't going to offer anything they hadn't already basically seen, so they opted out.

We could also wonder to what extent the episodic nature of the nuTrek films worked against them. One thing that the Star Wars, MCU, and F&F franchises have going for them is that each film has a connection to an overall story; character evolution carries over from one film to the next. Additionally, GotG not only had a variety of idiosyncratic main characters, it also nominally fit into the other MCU films, so you had a story within a story. It pulled in its audience from multiple directions. Part of going to see these films is to see the continuing story. It may have been a mistake to set the nuTrek films up as more of a series of standalone episodes, in which everything is more or less reset back to the status quo at the end (as defined by how the first nuTrek film ended).

 

I object to the assertion that I was shifting goal posts. But I understand why you did that. Putting that aside, you make an excellent point about the episodic nature of the films not working in their favor, which circles back to the TNG films losing their audience in part of that.

Hopefully filmmakers look back at II-IV and how a continuing story is what kept audiences hooked.

 

Huh? The crossover audiences who went to see IV heard it was good. They didn't care so much about the continuing story...many hadn't even seen III or maybe even II.

 

Fair enough. My point stands that it would work in its favor today when audiences expect an ongoing story between films.

 

The original international release also had a recap of sorts of II and III before the main feature to bring audiences up to speed.

 

Yeah, but that’s not essential to follow the movie.

 

Yeah, it reads as if he used to love Star Trek and doesn't like it anymore and hoping the franchise will fall on its face and take time to hibernate and make a rebirth. No worries about what he wrote, the movies will return to theatres in the future. Maybe it might be DISCO in a couple of years?

 

If they make a really good movie, backed by a couple of really good trailers, then promote the shit out of it... it will do well. I don't see the equivalence between a GI Joe movie and a Star Trek movie to be honest. I don't live in the US, but when was GI Joe actually a viable thing? It blew up in the UK in the 80s (Action Force!) but to me it's never seemed like a property that's a big deal.

 

The initial article trying to connect Star Trek and G.I. Joe was kind of reaching to begin with, IMO...

 

I like the first two GI Joe movies. (though I hated that they killed off Duke)

I tried to watch Snake Eyes this past weekend and was bored to death.
I stopped watching it about half way through.
(it's very rare for me to quit a movie that far in)

I would imagine that is also why it did poorly at the box office.

 

I would say the equivalence (on the cinema front) is that they are both Paramount action/adventure properties.

Kor

 

Slight then.

I'd stick my neck out and go so far as to say the two have quite distinct audiences.

 

Or poor marketing.

MOVIE GOER #1: I went to see Snake-Eyes over the weekend...
MOVIE GOER #2: Snake-what?
MOVIE GOER #1: Snake-Eyes. Y'know, the new G.I. Joe prequel...
MOVIE GOER #2: What's G.I. Joe?

G.I. Joe may be well known in geek culture, especially for those who were kids in the '80s, but I don't think it's quite a household name outside of that. I would argue that Transformers are more well known because of the big budget Michael Bay movies and also because--unlike G.I. Joe--they've generally kept an animated series or direct-to-DVD movie in production, as well as constantly keep new merchandise on store shelves. In comparison, G.I. Joe is only now showing a resurgence as a toy line after years of being Hasbro's unwanted stepchild (up until last year, Hasbro didn't even list G.I. Joe as a property on its website). The first two G.I. Joe movies did little to make the franchise the next big thing, IMO, and it seems that Snake-Eyes won't do it either...

How all this connects to future Star Trek movies? Go fig.

 

This is kind of like what happened with John Carter. The main producer thought the books and property had much greater cultural impact than they did so marketing was done with that assumption.

 

I like that movie a lot.
Have watched it at least 5 or 6 times now.