Bill Hunt from thedigitalbits.com posted this on his
facebook page.
A friend (in another thread) rightly pointed out that the home video business IS a business and that the studio would take on a project like TMP: DC - Remastered if they thought they could profit from it. That’s certainly true, and it’s worth pointing out that Paramount isn't exactly one of the more financially strong studios at the moment.
It is, however, not quite as simple as that. Having met with the executives in question multiple times now, it's become clear to me that many of them just aren't familiar with Trek, its fans, and its history. This is a problem I'm seeing at almost all of the major studios in the last 5 years - the recent and incoming decision makers just don't have any real familiarity with film. They don’t come from film schools, they come from business schools or law schools or marketing. And that’s fine - they’re genuinely good human beings and the studios certainly NEED people like that. But they often haven't even seen many of the titles they control, aren't really invested in them, and only make decisions based on spreadsheets. What this means is that they're largely unable to spot profit-making opportunities with their catalog in the way that Criterion or Shout! Factory or Twilight Time can.
An example of what I’m talking about is the Blade Runner: The Final Cut BD/DVD release from WHV ten years ago. Warner went all out on that release but, when it was in production (and I was previewing what they were doing), a couple senior executives there told me privately that they were really concerned that they were never going to make their money back on the project. They were looking at the spreadsheets alone and saying: “This movie has never made any money for the studio. It was a bust.” I told them in no uncertain terms that they were going to sell TONS of the sets (and I explained why - pent-up fan demand, a growing audience who really loved the film, the fact that the title had never gotten a good SE release) which they were happy to hear. In the end, it was a huge financial and critical success. The key was, there were still a few decision makers at WHV then who got it - who understood the film, its history, and its audience, and who KNEW there was an opportunity there. I believe there are opportunities like this with the Star Trek catalog films. The problem is, there just doesn’t seem to be any decision makers at Paramount who know the films, their history, and their audience well enough to see the opportunity there. And nobody’s willing to take even the smallest risks with catalog anymore at the studios. They’d rather focus on new release product, and license catalog titles out. The catch is, while Paramount licensed out much of their catalog to WHV a couple years ago, they kept the Trek titles back. But they’re not really doing much with them - even on the 50th Anniversary of the franchise.
The shame of it is that, if Paramount had taken advantage of the CBS Digital team & facility (which was just wrapping up work on TOS Remastered and was looking for other work) and brought in the VFX people who did the original work to supervise, they could have completed the TMP: DC Remaster for a fraction of the cost. But they missed the window and ultimately the CBS team was disbanded. What would convince Paramount to take on such a Remastering project now is hard to imagine. If the 50th Anniversary of Trek isn’t enough to do it, what would be? I guess we can hope for the 40th Anniversary of TMP in 2019. We'll see.
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