I'll agree, but only as something secondary to telling a fresh new story. Star Trek should also be accessible to the more casual fan who doesn't (desire to) know all ins and outs. (After all, isn't that how most of us probably became fans in the first place?)
What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
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I'll agree, but only as something secondary to telling a fresh new story. Star Trek should also be accessible to the more casual fan who doesn't (desire to) know all ins and outs. (After all, isn't that how most of us probably became fans in the first place?)
They are fine in moderation.
Yes.
I love most throwback references, even the ones that make little or absolutely no sense in-story. That said if MOST of an episode were callbacks and Trivia Night kind of dialogue?
No.
No.
Agreed. I love catching little easter eggs, but the story should be enjoyable without them.
I would disagree on this. I feel like TNG became a bit slower-paced much more in the later seasons than it did early on, BECAUSE it would sometimes get soap opera-esque. I think that early TNG has much more of a straight adventure feel whereas the more high-concept (and the soap opera stuff as well) often came later on.
TOS was $200,000 per episode. $1,857,037.04 in 2023 dollars.
TNG was $1,300,000 per episode $ $2,638,947.37 2023 dollars
Very low budgets for a movie in 2023
That’s part of what’s bothering me about Picard season 3. It’s relying almost completely on “memberberries”, references and all that. Previous seasons had that but not to this degree.
Paramount doesn't have small budget in their accounting system.
I watch a lot (3 or 4) of Troma's low budget 1/2 million per production (??).If they get the script right it works (Rare event) otherwise it's just a waste of half a million.
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To be fair the modern equivalent of a TOS weekly budget or TNG per-episode allocation would make it all look like a SyFy Channel movie of the week.
That would be a disaster. Movies don't shoot at the same pace as TV. Two pages per day versus something like six-to-eight pages per day. The budget would be stretched over three or four times as much shooting, if they want to have the same number of shots and keep the same level of thought that goes into each shot. So the film would look much cheaper than the average episode.
But let's say you want to keep the same number of shots as TV and the lack of complexity to the shots: Then you've just got a TNG two-parter. What's the point of even doing that? If you're going to the theater, you want to go to see something that's better than what you'd normally see on TV.
The cheapest Star Trek movie, TWOK, was done on an $11 Million budget in 1982. That would be $3.69 Million in 1966 dollars. That's 20 times the pattern budget per episode for TOS Season 1. According to Memory Alpha, principal photography for TWOK took place over 12 weeks. (source) That's 60 shooting days, versus six shooting days for the average TOS Season 1 episode. So if TWOK was 20 times the pattern budget and it took 10 times as many days to shoot, then that leaves every shooting day of TWOK costing twice as much as an episode of TOS Season 1.
Sorry for all the math, but the point is: even the lowest-budgeted Star Trek movie cost twice as much per shooting day as the highest-budgeted season of TOS. I don't even want to imagine what TWOK would've looked like with only half the pattern budget. It already looked like they were doing the minimum to service the scope of the story. Anything below that would've begun compromising the quality in a serious way.
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This might be a controversial opinion.
You don't need every episode of a tv show to have a $5 million budget to be great. Some of the massive amounts of graphics and screen overlays can be significantly reduced or just be gone, and I think for the better. (I feel like it's a mess of graphics trying to sift through it, anyway.) So much money is dumped into the post-production for those graphics, it uses up a lot of time and money.
The amount of money and time saved by reducing that... you can easily fit in 2 - 3 more episodes a season.
And using the older shows as a barometer, you can have great bottle episodes, such as...
"THE NAKED TIME"
"THE MENAGERIE" two-parter
"THE EMPATH" (almost the entire episode is in the Vians' lab)
"Where Silence Has Lease"
"The Offspring"
"Clues"
"The Drumhead"
"Lower Decks"
"DUET"
"WHISPERS"
"THE WIRE"
"IN THE CARDS"
"PROJECTIONS"
"SHUTTLEPOD ONE"
"SIMILITUDE"
"OBSERVER EFFECT"
You don't need every episode of a tv show to have a $5 million budget to be great. Some of the massive amounts of graphics and screen overlays can be significantly reduced or just be gone, and I think for the better. (I feel like it's a mess of graphics trying to sift through it, anyway.) So much money is dumped into the post-production for those graphics, it uses up a lot of time and money.
The amount of money and time saved by reducing that... you can easily fit in 2 - 3 more episodes a season.
And using the older shows as a barometer, you can have great bottle episodes, such as...
"THE NAKED TIME"
"THE MENAGERIE" two-parter
"THE EMPATH" (almost the entire episode is in the Vians' lab)
"Where Silence Has Lease"
"The Offspring"
"Clues"
"The Drumhead"
"Lower Decks"
"DUET"
"WHISPERS"
"THE WIRE"
"IN THE CARDS"
"PROJECTIONS"
"SHUTTLEPOD ONE"
"SIMILITUDE"
"OBSERVER EFFECT"
Yes, but those are episodes, not movies. If a movie is on the same scale as a TV episode, that's ripping off the audience.
It's a nice idea in principle, but it's completely unworkable. You'd end up with a product that looked like crap and nobody involved would benefit.
I know it wouldn't look great but it's meant to be fun and remember Trek's roots. Kind of like the DS9 tribbles episode. I feel like substance gets overshadowed by spectacle a lot by moviemakers. There are so many movies with high budgets/low returns and various story quality. Trek hasn't always looked great but the creatives and actors sweat to sell the antennas and plywood sets
I don’t know what to say. Others have explained the problems with your idea in more detail than me. People, most likely even fans, wouldn’t watch such a thing with a feeling of nostalgia. They’d be wondering why they paid money to watch something that looks like shit in a franchise which has spent the last few decades aiming much, much higher.
It is however a controversial opinion, so for the purposes of this thread you’re welcome to it.
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