I heard Discovery was just ending. 5 seasons isn't a bad slog. Same with Enterprise. 4 Seasons and almost 100 episodes. I'd take a full season of Crusade or Journeyman or Awake.
Paramount loses more than a quarter of its value, analyst believes they should "just quit streaming"
- Thread starter Citiprime
- Start date
I hate to say this... but it is not a good sign that Paramount Plus is putting up SNW season 1 for free on another site and killing PRODIGY in the same way MAX was killing their shows. Not when STAR TREK is one of the biggest names in their catalog.
I know PRODIGY was expensive to make, but shopping it around somewhere before you even finish post-production of the second season? It does reek of being the tax write off that Zaslov has been doing over at MAX.
I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but now I wondering if we'll get to the 1,000th episode before the next drought in the franchise.
I know PRODIGY was expensive to make, but shopping it around somewhere before you even finish post-production of the second season? It does reek of being the tax write off that Zaslov has been doing over at MAX.
I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but now I wondering if we'll get to the 1,000th episode before the next drought in the franchise.
If it was just ending and not canceled, they wouldn't have been given the ability to go back and shoot wrap up stuff to make it a series finale instead of a season finale.
That, IMO, is soft-peddling the truth. With DSC, they weren't told the fifth season would be the last until after they wrapped principal photography. Prompting additional shooting that wouldn't have taken place if they'd known the series would've ended with S5.
With ENT, the writing was on the wall, but technically the series wasn't formally cancelled until February 2005. IIRC, they were shooting "In the Mirror, Darkly" when news dropped that the show was cancelled.
I define "ended" (instead of "cancelled") as they already knew going in ahead of time -- and had official confirmation in advance -- that it would be the last season or last film. Not during production or after the fact. They planned for it to be the end before they even started shooting.
With ENT, the writing was on the wall, but technically the series wasn't formally cancelled until February 2005. IIRC, they were shooting "In the Mirror, Darkly" when news dropped that the show was cancelled.
I define "ended" (instead of "cancelled") as they already knew going in ahead of time -- and had official confirmation in advance -- that it would be the last season or last film. Not during production or after the fact. They planned for it to be the end before they even started shooting.
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Year Round trek was never going to be sustainable. It was amazing that the first year was successful, but it is too much.
I can understand (for whatever various reasons) why a show would be cancelled. But why would you remove it from your streaming service when you made it? You're not paying streaming rights, so why? To save disk space on the servers?
My guess is Paramount is deleting it for the same reason that Warner Bros. Discovery took a LOT of stuff off of Max (formerly HBO Max); to offset debt.
There's partial tax write-offs that media companies can achieve by removing content. By taking it off the streaming service, the costs which have been amortized — or assigned a cost that gets recognized by an entity across multiple years — over the series' expected lifetime get a partial write down. If years on that timeline remain, a company can remove that asset from distribution and use its remaining cost balance to offset taxable income elsewhere.
Paramount also gets out of having to pay any possible residuals to actors and writers. It's Ferengi economics.
Thanks. That makes some sense from a money perspective. It's certainly not about the creative works.
It hasn't been for a long time. It's just business.
It’s show business emphasis on business.
Multiple strikes are happening right now. I'm guessing these actions are related to those strikes.
After the cancellation and expected removal of Prodigy, I think it's another indication that the time of Paramount throwing money at Star Trek productions and hoping it could be the anchor for their streaming service is over. The first indication of it was arguably the decision to cancel Discovery abruptly.
I have a feeling, especially if some of the news reports about Paramount+'s financial situation are true, that going forward Star Trek properties are going to have to justify their existence in order to have multiple seasons. Paramount is not going to keep pouring millions into shows while they lose billions on their streaming service. Probably, at least for now, the era of Paramount experimenting with different Star Trek formats is going to end.
I have a feeling, especially if some of the news reports about Paramount+'s financial situation are true, that going forward Star Trek properties are going to have to justify their existence in order to have multiple seasons. Paramount is not going to keep pouring millions into shows while they lose billions on their streaming service. Probably, at least for now, the era of Paramount experimenting with different Star Trek formats is going to end.
- My guess is that both Paramount and Kurtzman are going to want something that will give them the best chance of having a "hit" going forward. Whether that's Legacy or not, I think the next series will be something that those in charge think is their safest bet to get viewers. It also wouldn't surprise me if, especially with the writers' strike and the potential of SAG and the Director's Guild joining in, that production on Starfleet Academy is "paused."
- Unless the powers that be feel there's a great idea and hook for Starfleet Academy or they feel confident that they have a great cast, I don't get the idea for this as a series. And this has been an idea thrown around since at least the 1980s for either a movie or series, with different producers taking a crack at the concept. If it's set at Starfleet Academy, then it becomes a Star Trek teen show merged with Top Gun where it'll probably be about personal relationships, and who's going to be the best in the class to get the best duty assignment. Unless they want to position Earth (and the Academy) being under threat from something each season, getting the characters into stories beyond the school/teen mix will require getting them away from the Academy, and then it's not really a Starfleet Academy show. Also, since a big part of Prodigy was about a young crew learning to become Starfleet officers, I'm not sure Starfleet Academy will fare any better.
- The entire premise that Paramount needs to do Star Trek shows that appeal to children and teens specifically to get younger viewers is flawed. If they do a good series, then the viewers will follow, including kids and teens. I'm guessing a significant number of the people reading this sentence got into Star Trek as kids, and we were watching series that produced good stories, not pandering to children and teens.
- I'm curious as to what the situation is with Strange New Worlds. There's been a lot of positive about it, and after its debut Paramount announced that it had the biggest opening audience for any Trek original series on Paramount+. However, I do think it's curious Paramount is basically giving away the first season and the first episode of the second season on someone else's streaming service (YouTube). That points to Paramount thinking their audience numbers are low for what it should be for Strange New Worlds, and they need to tap viewers that have either been unwilling to give Paramount+ a chance or Strange New Worlds specifically a chance.
- If Strange New Worlds is a hit for Paramount, or at least seen as viable for Paramount+ as one of their flagship shows, it probably goes a similar # of seasons as Discovery. If the numbers for SNW don't justify its costs, if and when production on season 3 begins, it'll probably be reworked and announced as the show's final season. My guess is the same dynamic will be true for Lower Decks as well.
- I can't see a shift just to special-event movies given the realities of production costs, which are usually amortized across multiple episodes of a season. Unless Paramount wants to save and reuse sets and go as cheap as possible with effects, the budgeting/cost issues probably wouldn't justify it.
- The fact Paramount is shopping what's left of Prodigy to other streaming services might be an indication that if the decision is made at some point that Star Trek on Paramount+ is not viable going forward, it might give the studio a measure of what they can expect to get as far as licensing.
Granted, ENT is the most recent Trek I've seen so far, but I do think that Paramount's made a mistake in spreading itself a bit too thin, even if we're only talking Trek here. There's a real risk of saturating the market, and that already happened to some extent in the 1990s when first TNG and DS9 and later DS9 and VGR were running concurrently.
[QUOTE="Citiprime, post: 14534718, member: 90858"
I'm not so sure about that, in the past censorship rules on network TV ensured that very little that most people would consider to be inappropriate for preteens and teens to watch could be broadcast at all. Never mind the fact that a large segment of the population thinks that sci-fi is geared towards kids in general, no matter how adult the content may be. The arrival of cable and later streaming services have provided an outlet for "edgier" sci-fi shows with content that's inappropriate for preteens and younger teens. I'm thinking of shows like the Battlestar Galactica remake and Westworld as two examples that I've seen. One could argue that DSC and PIC belong in the same category, but I haven't seen them (yet).
I hope that Paramount's financial troubles can persuade them to license the more recent shows to a major player like Netflix, outside the US at least. TOS, TNG, DS9, and ENT are available on Netflix outside the US.
[QUOTE="Citiprime, post: 14534718, member: 90858"
- The entire premise that Paramount needs to do Star Trek shows that appeal to children and teens specifically to get younger viewers is flawed. If they do a good series, then the viewers will follow, including kids and teens. I'm guessing a significant number of the people reading this sentence got into Star Trek as kids, and we were watching series that produced good stories, not pandering to children and teens.
I'm not so sure about that, in the past censorship rules on network TV ensured that very little that most people would consider to be inappropriate for preteens and teens to watch could be broadcast at all. Never mind the fact that a large segment of the population thinks that sci-fi is geared towards kids in general, no matter how adult the content may be. The arrival of cable and later streaming services have provided an outlet for "edgier" sci-fi shows with content that's inappropriate for preteens and younger teens. I'm thinking of shows like the Battlestar Galactica remake and Westworld as two examples that I've seen. One could argue that DSC and PIC belong in the same category, but I haven't seen them (yet).
I hope that Paramount's financial troubles can persuade them to license the more recent shows to a major player like Netflix, outside the US at least. TOS, TNG, DS9, and ENT are available on Netflix outside the US.
Very possible. They save money on paying out residuals to actors, for starters.
Did you get caught up in the temporal Cold War? ENT was twenty odd years ago!
It’s insane how quickly two decades go by actually. I very much agree Paramount has spread itself too thin. I’ve enjoyed most of the avalanche of content that’s spilled our way the past few years. It’s been an exciting time to be a Trek fan (unless you’ve been a rabid NuTrek hater, and even those guys seem to get enjoyment out of hating it, so everyone is happy really).
Im braced for a drastic reduction in Trek output though. It’s all extremely expensive to make and, unfortunately, unlike Star Wars (which I’m personally sick of and have checked out of now), Trek doesn’t seem to appeal much to a general audience. Why, I have no idea. But I get the feeling that the current shows are catnip for Trek fans but I’m not sure if they’re pulling in new viewers and creating new fans. PIC S3 is a case in point: very well received by the fans because they went overboard catering to the fans, but I’m not sure how many non-Trek fans it likely pulled in. They have a difficult balancing act; giving the fans what they want (which, largely seems to be familiarity; old characters and revisiting old plot points and continuity) while also hopefully enticing new viewers and not scaring them away with too much established lore. I think they’ve generally done a decent job balancing the two, but I’m not terribly optimistic about the future of Trek right now. I think things may eventually wind down but if we’re lucky we still may have at least one show running at a given time. The days of being spoilt for choice are over though.
I would say that... well, we had five Trek shows running at peak, and a couple more being discussed. Given that (1) one show has reached its planned conclusion, (2) one has been called after its last season, and (3) one appears to be about to cease to exist completely, if the P+ crew have their way... I would say that the franchise is on shaky ground at this point.
Your other thread starts basically the same way...
Merging with the pre-existing topic.
I tried this service here in the UK this year, and was shocked to find everything was only 1080p, nothing in 4k and no HDR, like it was 2010 again.
