No, but since it is all cloak and dagger type stuff then they can just work it like the Section 31 series of books did, with a lot of classification and BTS manipulation of events seen, like the whole Romulan cloaking device theft by Kirk. All of this for fear of crossing canon lines.
Star Trek is about optimism of the human race's future and action adventure. They can do that in any time period.
And yet it here we are.
If we don't represent the wider audience, then what was Season 2 about?
Yes, largely.
But why? Didn’t JJverse prove there is value (potentially more so) in alternative timelines as well? I wanna see the bean counter who “proved” that Prime = $€£¥ and see his analytics.
It's a real shame. CBS using Trek as a streaming hook means they basically just need to get Trek die-hards, which doesn't necessarily mean people who have Memory Alpha on the bookmarks bar, but the kind of people who stuck with '90s Trek all the way to the end of Enterprise, or always go to see every movie. The pool they're after, that they've gotten, is narrower than the mass-market success TNG or ST09 enjoyed, but it's still a much wider and less picky group than us, talking about it on the internet. Discovery seems to have proven that the market of people who will pay to tune into anything with "Star Trek" in the name is wide enough to justify spending a lot of money, but that's the real point; we'll all tune in to anything with Star Trek in the name. They're aiming at a small enough niche that they can afford to take chances, make more long-shot gambles, do more weird stuff and maybe hit the jackpot with a real large-scale hit. Instead, they seem terrified that if they make too many sudden moves, the kinds of people who didn't pull an Elvis and shoot their own TVs after watching, I don't know, "A Night in Sickbay," will cancel their CBSAA subscriptions en masse, so they put a crowd-pleasing popcorn producer in charge of the franchise and make a big deal about "respecting canon" rather than trying to make a show that the same number of people (or more!) would watch even without the Star Trek branding.
Yeah, on that note, i have the feeling that it was less the Discovery production crew and more CBS who got cold feet on the pre-TOS setting.
My thoughts as well. The knee jerk reaction and fear of misspent funds is more likely to drive companies away from franchises than draw them in.
Well, it was the worst Star Trek movie ever. Not that it had anything to do with in which timeline it was set, just like Nemesis being an utter piece of crap had nothing to do with it being set in the prime. Though interestingly both of those films attempted to remake The Wrath of Khan, and ended up as total disasters.
It is my opinion that it is the worst Star Trek movie ever, whether anyone agrees doesn't really matter, though I'm hardly alone in the opinion that it wasn't very good. But the demise of the Kelvin branch is really not due any individual film, it is due them not making enough of the damn films, good or bad, thus killing the momentum. Personally I don't much care, as I never liked them, but from Paramount's POV it is silly. As you pointed out, even these crap films made shitton of money, so there clearly was a market for them.
Beyond was fine. It was actually fun. What killed Kelvin Universe is Paramount being too cheap to pay the salary to both Chrises they agreed upon. They wanted their star power on the cheap. Well too bad. Pine and Hemsworth sure don't need Paramount as much as Paramount needs them.
