Discovery Theory

[Galaxy]

1. CBS owns all rights to the Trek universe, including the stories they "let" Paramount depict in the movies, and the stories told in novels and comics. There's no "legal" reason CBS can't set their first "Star Trek" series in any universe they want, since they own the story rights to ALL the previous Trek episodes and movies. (Paramount needs permission from CBS to use Trek characters and storylines in its movies, not the other way around.)

Not entirely accurate. The KelvinVerse belongs to Paramount. That is why the Star Trek Novels do not feature the destruction of Romulus, Simon &Schuster/Pocket Books operate on a CBS license only. To my knowledge the only group operating on both a CBS, and Paramount license is Star Trek Online.

 

[tenmei]

Not entirely accurate. The KelvinVerse belongs to Paramount. That is why the Star Trek Novels do not feature the destruction of Romulus, Simon &Schuster/Pocket Books operate on a CBS license only. To my knowledge the only group operating on both a CBS, and Paramount license is Star Trek Online.

I think the IDW license covers both - but I seem to recall the IDW license doesn't cover DS9 or something like that?

 

[Ralphis]

Legally it's not going to happen. Two separate businesses with their own walled garden franchises.

I would agree, unless of course an agreement could be made between CBS and Paramount. It is not as though they have not collaborated before.

They have the same parent company, so I'm not sure if it's completely out of the question if there could be some sort of agreement. But I actually like the idea of the TV and movie properties being separate 'universes'. That way they don't have to track each other and can just focus on delivering a good story.

 

[elric428]

My new theory...
The Prime Universe has always looked the way it does on Discovery. Between Discovery and the Pike era, someone has meddled with the past (Guardian of Forever maybe?) resulting in the TOS look we all know and love. Only Guinan remembers the way it was

 

[F. King Daniel]

I'm part of the school of thinking that the events of the temporal cold war were already part of TOS history, but this is a pretty elegant way to reason they production differences. I'm just not ready to accept that the former future is no more.

Oh man I'm having 09 flashbacks.

I used to try and rationalise and make sense of Trek's temporal shenanigans, but I realised the only way to accurately sum it up is thusly: