still, that summer was crazy packed. beyond needed better marketing and a better (read: less competitive) release date.
...and a better movie that would capture the interest of nowadays audiences.
Marketing is important but if the source material isn't that new and interesting, to begin with, the marketing guys can do very little. And again, pegg&co didn't give them a lot to use (just look at the press kit and their interviews. Honestly, Lin seemed uninterested about his own movie too) .
Frankly they were the first to give the movie a bad promotion..
I remember how they made it seems they totally ignored stid and the movie was undoing everything JJ had done, which honestly backfired. People loved the first two, you can't distance yourself from them and expect those people to come back and give you their money for a sequel you don't want to give.
And if you make it seems the movie was specifically made only to placate reboot haters and tos purists, again you can't complain if this alienates the rest of the audience. I find it annoying, by itself, that they expected everyone to come back and make their movie successful too after months they were doing everything in their power to tell us that their movie would kind of ignore the first two. They gave no hope to reboot fans. And again, please anyone here can define what is a 'trek' movie? Because there is, again, nothing more trek in beyond than the first 2. Nothing. Nothing but the nostalgia the third movie has, but that isn't being 'trek' for me.
Then there is the fact, not irrelevant, that for a long time they had promoted it as a dudes only fest ...case in point the dubai thing where it seemed like none of the actresses where there (which was false) to the extent some sites were mocking them saying 'star trek beyond the women', this was also exacerbated by the fan event where they didn't invite any of the actresses, and the fact Lin&Pegg were only talking about the dudes.
In our age and time you truly can't expect to attract nowadays audiences like that. A lot of people have dudebro exhaustion now, and in a time where you have successful movies like wonder woman, the hunger games and guardians of the galaxy it is beyond, excuse me, idiotic for trek to be the one thing that goes backwards and kind of promotes a 'women ain't sh*t' ideal. And for months, Beyond seemed to get promoted like that honestly.
Frankly, it was the marketing guys, actually, who eventually started to use Uhura and Jaylah a lot for posters and promotion so Pegg&co should thank them for doing some damage control there after THEY had given a bad image to their movie.
Marketing guys, contrary to the director and writers, also tried to make people think the big 3 of this trek was still kirk-uhura-spock because they know it worked (not to mention her image is more useful than Urban's or Pegg's), but people aren't stupid and it was made obvious by the creative team (and then watching the movie itself), and the clips they had released, that they had pushed Uhura aside to try to restore the old trio and give more screentime to both Urban and Pegg. The image the movie was getting essentially was one of 'let's placate the ones who were complaining that uhura replaced mccoy'. Even the first positive reviews the movie got made it obvious (even in this board, some guys were saying they were happy about them sidelining Uhura to finally give them moar old school bromance. Of course they don't get that this kind of 'positive reviews' actually is very negative for another side of the audience that accidentally contributed making beyond the least successful. .)
A lot of critics lamented, rightfully so, that the two minorities of the cast, Zoe and John, were the most sidelined and a 'pair the spares' to make it so the secondary male characters like Mccoy and Scotty had more screentime with the leads. It was the truth. Uhura has a more key role than the guys for sure, but Karl replaced Zoe as third lead and Pegg gave himself more screentime than he honestly needed. The fact her image is used, still, more for promotion makes it all worse because it means they do get it that making it a dudes fest is a bad idea and they get that JJ's movies were liked by a modern audience because of him elevating a female character to the original trio level too, but they still purposedly decided to make it a dudes fest to placate their own self serving fanboy bias. Urban's victimism about stid was, in particular, really ridiculous to me.
In the end, they sidelined even Spock. He was stuck with Mccoy for nostalgia and didn't even get to interact with the other characters more. He didn't even interact with the villain.
And don't let me start about the villain! They really wasted Elba and he didn't get an ounce of the promotion Benedict got during stid promotion. And this, again, wasn't the marketing people's fault only.
Ironically, Uhura and Sulu were placed in the most interesting, plot wise, and useful part of the movie since they were at the main villain's base...but you get the sense they didn't use it enough, and thus sidelined them because they sidelined the villain too, and they rather focused on what kirk and the others were doing.
If kirk or spock had been trapped at the base too, we'd probably see more of the villain and we'd discover more things about Altamid and the people who created the technology Krall was using.
In a sense, this is the first movie with them being 'explorers' but we didn't really see it either. There is no genuine mystery to unfold, no sense of wonder, not a real discovering a new world. They were stuck on this planet and it is not that different from the crew spending time in earth. The universe seems still small.
Honestly, destryoing the ship was a mistake too. Idk, I just think it limited the plot and took away one of the main aspects that make people want to watch movies like trek where you see spaceships.
There also is less a sense of futurism...even with yorktown, the movie still feels outdated and not really like it is set in the far future. It is weird.
It is hard to explain maybe, but I definitely feel like they wasted a lot of potential there.
Tl dr: the movie has issues that people had voiced. They did, they do. If Pegg wants to understand what didn't work, maybe, he must read those reviews/responses too or it is better to not comment it at all because, again, pretending that everything was the marketing guys's fault is reductive, naive, and ridiculous.
For some people, the movie might actually be even 'lucky' in that it didn't really flop like movies from the same genre had flopped in spite of having more interesting general plots. If we want to be truly fair, Beyond was still saved, maybe, by the fact it is trek AND because of the popularity JJ's trek already had. Frankly, I saw nostalgia making some critics give this movie a pass for stuff they without mercy criticize other movies for.
I'm not sure that had this movie been the first of the trilogy, it'd get the same praise and popularity jj's first movie got. If Pegg thinks that, and he thinks his movie was better, he's entitled to think that but it doesn't mean he is right and maybe facts already clash with that idea, if it really is his opinion.
