My second biggest complaint with Into Darkness (after Spock's "Khaaaaan!") was that, by the identical-to-ST'09 ending, it felt like nothing that happened really mattered. Compare with Beyond, where at the end they had a new ship and had come to terms with the loss of Old Spock. Still not status quo smashing which I was hoping for, but it felt like more.
True, but do they risk another unknown protagonist like beyond or do we see the return of franchise favourites such as Klingons, romulans or someone else? My fear is that if it gets made will it just be another self contained story again? This approach is what scuppered the TNG movies largely. Trek movies always work best when there's an element of serialisation, an ongoing story, like the TOS movies (especially 2, 3 and 4). I feel like another generic alien villain hell bent on revenge (yawn) will just tank, people barely gave a shit about beyond and krall, maybe it's time to pick up the threads left from STID or something along those lines. Make the story feel important again.
Unfortunately, this is wildly inaccurate. You are including all this extra revenue from additional sources without including all the extra costs involved and distribution agreements with other companies. The partnering and licensing agreements do not exist solely to benefit the Studio, those companies intend on making a profit themselves. The revenue that a Studio receives is a fraction of the overall revenue generated by a movie. And I'm not sure what this "merchandising deal" that Star Trek had in China. First of all, there will be hardly any merchandise sold in China and anything that is sold is likely to be done illegally by local companies since China rarely enforces intellectual property laws internally. Second, I hope you are not referring to the Alibaba partnership since that was merely an investor relationship (though it may have involved distribution rights - it's all a little vague) like Alibaba has done with other films. There is never EVER going to be a windfall of money coming from China. That's not how the Chinese system works. That's why there is never any Home Media revenue from China - Piracy abounds! I said it back on the original threads and I'll say it again. My opinion on getting another movie was that we would need to wait and see the Home Video revenue. The Box Office revenue was not just disappointing, it was surprisingly low. Almost all the other secondary revenue streams are BASED on Box Office performance. The extra benefits that the Star Trek franchise has is its exceedingly high Home Video sales and some additional ancillary revenue in merchandise. Though a few million in books, comics, posters, etc, is nice, it isn't going to mean much if the Tens of millions of dollars that the previous films received from Home Video were to suddenly disappear. Right now . . . DVD and Blue Ray also seems to have dried up. The reduction in Home Video revenue is significantly higher than even the dropoff at the domestic box office. I guess people weren't skipping it in theater to buy it for home viewing later. I still think we might see another Star Trek movie but only because of the dire straights that Paramount finds itself in with their lack of success overall and the shortage of legitimate properties to build around going forward. By the way, Deadline did the top 20 movie breakdown in terms of profitability for last year and STB didn't make the list. If STB had made money the way you describe they would have easily made the top 20. It might take 3-5+ years for it to even break even. Which means no one is making much return on their investment (if they make any profit) and finding investors for subsequent movies will be much harder than for the previous installments.
Completely agree with this. In fact, when STID was released, an acquaintance of mine made an observation which has stuck in my mind: "the movie feels like its stuck in the 2009 film's orbit". In other words, that we might all have been expecting the sequel to boldly go forward in character development etc, but it starts out and ends more or less exactly where the previous movie did. All the character growth Kirk went through in '09 is reset-buttoned at the start of STID for the sake of "continuing the story" of the first movie, rather than forging forward from that final scene and growing the characters. The biggest indicator is that you can literally skip STID and move straight from the end of '09 to the start of Beyond without even missing a beat. Beyond, at least, starts with the characters in a new place. And ends with them in another new place.
I would disagree with that. At the end of '09 he's still just a cocky kid who happened to step up in a crisis and got the ship handed to him. He hasn't experienced failure, hasn't lost a crewmember and thinks he's infallible. To jump from that to the believable commander in Beyond would be jarring. In ID, he loses his father figure/mentor and his instincts are repeatedly shown to be wrong - he has to rely on his crew to guide him, and has to overcome his own desire for vengeance to expose Marcus' plot. He loses crew, nearly loses his ship and has to confront his failure. That's significant growth, and it's a lot more than we get in most of the other films or episodes.
Current Beyond disc sales: 1.929 million $34.8 million Beyond is currently also #3 on Netflix's rental list.
Thanks for the update. Does the Netflix rating help in anyway for future films? Also, are digital sales significant? Comcast offers digital sales (for ownership as well as rental)...just wondering if those numbers are recorded and affect anything
Saw some info on this recently. Digital is generally 50-100% of disc sales. They are not reported very often yet, but that may change in the future. Usually such info comes out years later. So With current US disc sales we have $378 million, then $20 million for overseas sales, then $17 to $35 million for digital. Not counting rights and the like. Just more pieces to the secondary revenue pie. RAMA
Beyond has officially hit $380 million with combined box office/disc sales alone. it has sold roughly 2,070,000 million units in the USA. RAMA
Yes, it would have made things easier, especially in the public view. However, it's secondary revenue is in the $500 million range already. Of course that would be closer to $650 million if it had made what we thought it would/should. I just saw an article that stated digital sales have just surpassed physical ones for movies, so it's also possible Beyond made more than $37 million from digital.