Nah, that was to make sure the audience understood that Spock was not gay.
40 years of slash fanfic haven't been enough to convince Trekkies that Spock is gay. I don't think they need to worry about that.
OK, But your post really boils down to "here's why I liked Star Trek XI." I'm not saying your points are right or wrong, but I'm saying you could have made the same ones about say... First Contact for example.
Sure, why not? That's the other
Trek film that had notably mass-audience-pleasing elements. But
Trek IX has the additional feature of franchise-resurrecting elements that were not required of FC because the franchise wasn't in critical condition at that time.
My list explains a) why the people in charge made the decisions they did (the need to attract back the mass audience and re-brand
Trek from "irrelevant, pathetic, failure" to "exciting, new, successful" while not offending the core fans except for the ones who insist on being offended and are a lot cause); and b) why
Trek IX was therefore a critical and financial success. That success was carefully planned and carried out; it wasn't just dumb luck.
-focused on aspects of Trek the general audience had heard of: Picard, Data, and the Borg("resistance is futile" had made it into mainstream pop culture by the time of FC's release)
That worked then, but the TNG characters just don't have the legs of the TOS gang and by now, the TNG characters and actors have worn out their welcome. It might be possible to resurrect TNG at some point via recasting, but envision doing that vs the TOS characters: it just doesn't seem as interesting, does it?
-had romance in the form of Data-Borg Queen
Ugh. Hardly a selling point!
FC was a good movie despite all that cringe-worthy nonsense. I was so embarrassed for the actors that they had to be put through that.
-awesome casting in James Cromwell, Alice Krige, and Alfre Woodard
Good actors, but not exactly box office draws. Then again,
Trek isn't about stunt casting. I doubt this factor played a role one way or the other.
I think the stars were just very well-aligned for Star Trek XI in that there hadn't been new Trek in a while so there was a greater demand, it went back to the TOS era for the nostalgia effect, etc.
Demand is created, it doesn't just happen. I never believed the argument that
Star Trek failed on TV because there was too much of it - it failed because the business model of TV was changing so that sf/f was becoming untenable on network TV, and I'm sure creative stagnation played a role as well - and I certainly don't believe that after a few years off TV, there was some sudden groundswell of hunger for
Star Trek. It would have been very easy for a
Star Trek movie in 2009 to have been as big a disastrous failure as
Nemesis.
If you want to be successful in the entertainment business, you have to
manage demand and know how to create it when the time is right. Nobody can afford to just passively wait for demand to "happen." It will
never happen. The general audience doesn't pay attention to
Star Trek or to any other property to realize that they haven't seen anything from it in a while. Their attention is distracted by the 200 other things that are vying for their money at any given moment.
Trek IX had to be carefully designed to break through all the competing noise by delivering something that could take over where the marketing campaign left off, and keep going on positive word of mouth. If it hadn't delivered a very specific type of entertainment experience, the word of mouth part of the campaign would have fizzled and the box office would have dropped off after the first weekend, like we see so many times from unsuccessful movies.
This discussion leads to nothing at this moment.
Russ's attitude comes off on me as being an arrogant jerk.
