Yes, the marketing for BEY was really abysmal. It was practically non-existent, except for Rhianna's "Sledgehammer" song. I think that, and the fact that they delayed STID 4 years after they had build so much momentum on the success and energy of the first film really killed their chances of building a nice little film franchise.
Yeah, I work in IP licensing - the "25% is typically the number used when making one product similar to another. It must be at least 25% different in order to avoid copyright infringement" is completely bogus, if that were true you could plagiarize 70% of a novel and not fall afoul of copyright laws. I will give Eaves the benefit of the doubt and say he may have very well been told it was a legal requirement. There were times when my engineers or marketing people wanted to go down obvious ratholes and I would just tell them "Sorry, Legal says 'no' " - they never knew that wasn't the case, I was the one that talked to our attorneys, not them, lol. The second film really should have come out in 2011. Based on the Transformers movies, I bet they probably could have released at least five movies on a biennial basis before interest waned. That 2009-2015 window was also a prime opportunity because Star Wars was dormant.
The part that always got to me about the way Beyond was marketed is that there was no talk about it outside of Trek fandom circles until Anton Yelchin's death a month prior to the movie's release. Which always made me wonder, if he hadn't died, when were they planning to begin promoting the movie?
I think Paramount was taken aback by the response to the first trailer, because people hated it, they may have just decided not to spend all that much on further promotion.
Was it though? I mean, I think that speaks more to the question of the fundamental trends in filmmaking in general than Trek in particular.
My favorite version of Star Trek, across the whole franchise, is the TOS movies…so for me personally, it was
I would be curious as to what LA looked like at the time. Executives and professionals in the business tend to be very near sighted. If they see it around the places they frequent then it can be assumed that that and the Star Trek name are enough. That's how Disney got burned by John Carter.
If the Kelvin Star Trek Movies went like the Transformers Movies, we'd have five mainline ones by now, a one-off that was more retro-'60s style the way Bumblebee was retro-'80s style, and we'd be getting a NuTOS/NuTNG crossover movie soon, since TNG for Star Trek is like Beast Wars for Transformers.
Kelvinverse isn’t a problem. If anything, it would probably be cheaper to make a Picard follow up than a Kelvin film. And Paramount is belt tightening right now. It’s the writer’s strike, followed by what would be the story after how PIC S3 ended, followed by how much will this make at the box office. Paramount will be receptive to a Star Trek film that makes more than Star Trek Into Darkness did, at least, if it has the same budget. And I don’t see how it doesn’t do well at the box office; a couple of Patrick Stewart’s films, X-Men: Days of Future’s Past and Logan, did quite well and outperformed the Kelvin films.
Those were comic book movies, at pretty much the height of comic book movie fandom. Hardly an appropriate comparison. And even those aren't a sure thing anymore.
I can't prove it, but I think the film industry is heading into another change. After the MCU topples, and it has to eventually, we'll be in the wilderness for a bit, until something else becomes The Next Big Thing. Cinema won't just die. It might become smaller, but it won't outright die.
Top Gun Maverick proved that you can make a movie that doesn’t have super heroes or lightsabers and still have a universal blockbuster. Hopefully the industry took notice.
That's a slippery slope. Are the studios going to make fun, well written, well acted, people pleasing movies like Maverick? Or..... Are we going to get a barrage of sequels from dormant properties from the 80's?
Hopefully the former. It helps that they're running out of things from the '80s to resurrect. I'm so glad Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis have it in their contracts that another Back to the Future movie can't be made without their approval... and they'll never give it. But I'll settle for anything that's not a superhero movie. And please make more R-rated movies! I'm sick of almost everything being PG-13! I don't like PG-13 because it tells me one of two things: It's either a PG movie with something stupid thrown in to make it PG-13, or it's an R movie with the guts cut out of it (figuratively or literally) to make it PG-13. There are very few movies that are naturally PG-13.
No wonder someone in another thread said they were surprised I like PIC Season 3 so much. Honestly, it has more to do with I already liked Picard to begin with, and I thought TNG deserved better than to go out with Nemesis. They also waited until the end of the next-to-last episode before they had the entire crew back together and on the Enterprise-D. They didn't give it to us Season 1, Episode 1. To the people who wanted that, I say, "No. That's what you think you wanted!" The X-Files Seasons 10-11 are proof to me why it's a good thing Picard didn't go that way. Nothing really changed in The X-Files once Mulder and Scully were back in their office, except they threw in some pop-culture and current-event references to say "Hey, we're in the 2010s now! See? See?!" Things that work in the moment but become dated pretty quickly. I watched all of Season 10, but then tuned out of Season 11 part-way through. Not that I thought it was bad, I just lost interest.
The WGA strike has put the kibosh on any momentum a Picard follow-up project with the original TNG cast might have had. Aside from the new seasons SNW & Discovery already in the can, we won't be seeing any live action Trek for a while.
Meh. I'm more then willing to wait a few extra months if it means writers, and probably actors, get a fair shake.
I admire your optimism, but writers getting a fair shake is something that has never happened in the entire history of show business.