You mean the modern Trek who's last film was the biggest financial black hole of the franchise? The modern Trek that nobody was watching anymore over on UPN (except maybe old school fans looking for the continuity they finally provided)?
Yeah, yeah, yeah...
Why don't you go look at the amounts and percentage of income that "modern Trek" represents for Paramount?
Star Trek's successful return to television in the late 1980s stabilized and broadened what was a reasonably successful series of modestly-budgeted films - not blockbusters, for the most part, but targeting a reliable and unvarying fanbase - into a dependably profit-generating franchise for the studio, one of the cornerstones of their success for at least a decade. If Trek had remained the continuing adventures of Aging Kirk and Spock we'd be looking back nearly twenty years to the last installment of
Star Trek and talking about how it petered out - and this movie would be a much, much longer shot than it even is now. That
Star Trek is the brand that it is today, with what international success it has really had (largely English-speaking and German) has at least as much to do (more, in many places outside the U.S.) with Picard and his Enterprise and their braod appeal to children and families in the early 1990s as with a 1960s TV show that peaked in syndicated popularity in the early 1980s.
Certainly the foundation of the franchise is the original and the original characters and Abrams's people are clever enough to recognize that, but just because you might prefer them to the later iterations - as I do - doesn't mean that you get to have your own facts.
