Star Trek is not about your precious canon.
To CBS least of all. They do not distinguish between "timelines". It's all about licensing, rivalries and $$$$$$.
Thanks for screwing Star Trek, CBS...
- Thread starter Admiral Buzzkill
- Start date
Star Trek is not about your precious canon.
To CBS least of all. They do not distinguish between "timelines". It's all about licensing, rivalries and $$$$$$.
Bingo.
Is Abrams going to ban stuff from Episode 1-6 of Star Wars when he's in charge?
I hope he does because aside from the lego most of the Star Wars merchandise is rubbish IMO.
I hope he does because aside from the lego most of the Star Wars merchandise is rubbish IMO.
Of course not. Why would he do that?
Future revenues.
The movie studio is trying to expand the fanbase and make Star Trek a viable property going forward. Bad Robot wants CBS to prioritize the new movie franchise in merchandising because that's the way branding and multimedia exploitation works.
If what the movie studio and Bad Robot does works, then it brings new customers into the market who want to buy Star Trek goods.
CBS, however, prioritized the existing revenue streams over the potentially greater revenue streams. Rather than treat the films as the bleeding edge and supporting that, CBS is treating the films as the red-headed stepchild of the franchise.
I'd love to see the Bad Robot market research stating that there was "brand confusion" between his Trek and Prime Trek.
Honestly, I don't think there are any good answers here. CBS wants to protect their revenue streams, and Abrams wants to ensure the best possible success for anything his production company does with Trek. I honestly don't think it's worth killing a possible cash cow like a new TV series, etc. over, but I'm imagining that there's tons of behind-the-scenes stuff that we just don't know.
It could be a simple case of CBS being incredibly difficult to work with and Abrams not wanting to deal with it. I doubt it has anything to do with "arrogance" or anything other personal motivations people may ascribe to him.
That said, just because CBS doesn't want to work with Bad Robot on a new TV series doesn't mean that televised Trek is dead.
Trek survived the cancellation of TOS, Trek survived TMP, Trek survived Voyager and Enterprise, and Trek will survive both CBS and Abrams.
Honestly, I don't think there are any good answers here. CBS wants to protect their revenue streams, and Abrams wants to ensure the best possible success for anything his production company does with Trek. I honestly don't think it's worth killing a possible cash cow like a new TV series, etc. over, but I'm imagining that there's tons of behind-the-scenes stuff that we just don't know.
It could be a simple case of CBS being incredibly difficult to work with and Abrams not wanting to deal with it. I doubt it has anything to do with "arrogance" or anything other personal motivations people may ascribe to him.
That said, just because CBS doesn't want to work with Bad Robot on a new TV series doesn't mean that televised Trek is dead.
Trek survived the cancellation of TOS, Trek survived TMP, Trek survived Voyager and Enterprise, and Trek will survive both CBS and Abrams.
Exactly so.
What CBS is doing is a sure-fire formula for diminishing returns; they're eating their young. Fans already complain about the declining quality and variety of Trek merchandise - well, you can expect to see that continue.
These people are incompetents.
Trek survived DS9, the series that launched the Franchise into the realm of declining viewership on television.
Same reason as stopping the merchandising from other Star Trek series.
Which I don't understand.
Why would buying a Slave Leia doll be conceptually any different from a 'Trouble With Tribbles' figurine.
Which I don't understand.
Why would buying a Slave Leia doll be conceptually any different from a 'Trouble With Tribbles' figurine.
Not the point I was making, as there were still years of televised Trek ahead of it at that point, and I don't necessarily disagree, but you're so argumentative that I won't agree.
I don't think so. I think CBS is trying to prevent what happened in the late 90s when Trek was everywhere and every non-Trekkie had gotten their fill of it already.
By only having movies, Trek becomes a special event each time one is released and general interest in Trek goes up.
It was obvious a decade ago during the Christmas of Nemesis that the studio was woefully behind the times. Other studios that year understood the power of marketing synergy and exploited it -- there were merchandising and promotional tie-ins for every major franchise that year (Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, James Bond) except for Star Trek.
I had hope that CBS had learned the synergy lesson in 2009 -- there were Burger King tie-ins, cereal boxes, toys in grocery stores -- but whatever oomph they got out of that dissipated because there wasn't any follow-through. That's on CBS.
While Star Wars is a much bigger cash cow, I'm confused. The people who buy action-figures, models, novels are so small (I think I've seen 2% of those who watch actually buy the spin-off merchandise) and I'm pretty sure that they're the group that will have no issues telling one brand apart from another.
I buy TOS novels and merchandise and I buy Abrams merchandise and would've bought the novels if they had existed.
It sounds more like "the audience" is too stupid to figure out what books/merchandise they want to buy so we need to eliminate one.
But isn't part of the problem that Abramsverse merchandise simply didn't sell that well?
Wasn't LeVar Burton saying something like this about Abrams a few months ago?
Relative to what? Playmates released 2.2 million units of the JJprise (and regretted it). The production run on DST's line of Trek ships is 7,500 units per ship. Some even less. Despite the glut JJprise sold way, way more units.
What is clear here is that Bad Robot tried to get the rights to market nuTrek as its own separate thing. But CBS wanted its TOS mechandise to be able to ride the coattails of any nuTrek marketing blitz that might occur, which, conveniently, CBS would not have to contribute any money toward.
Bad Robot got pissed off and left the table. Yet, somehow, the "Give me back my canon!" people have twisted this into:
"Abrams tried to ruin the canon even more than he already has!!"
Neither Paramount nor CBS give a crap about Star Trek canon. They have shareholders to answer to.
That is NOT what this is. Canon is important to fanboys, not corporations.
Here's an example of current Trek tie-ins. If nuTrek wasn't already seen as self-parody, this commercial certainly makes the case that it should be treated as such, complete with oppressive lens-flare.
The less I see of this stuff the better, IMHO.
The less I see of this stuff the better, IMHO.
Nimoy put on the ears many times for a paycheck.
And they were far cheaper and of poor quality. I doubt they sell a ton of units if they put the care and cost into making those toys, because the cost would've been far more to the consumer. The play-sets and action figures were shit.
This isn't about canon. This is about control of the product. Besides, TV and video games were wide-open for Bad Robot and we got no inclination they were interested in doing TV and the Video Game is glitchy. Instead of worrying about Trek novels and action figure sales should've been worried about competing with Gears of War and other far more mainstream entities.
Exactly, and a poor stock price today would see executives fired. It seems CBS has no problem sharing the pie with the Abrams folks, they just weren't going to give them the whole thing.
Of course they're out to make money. Even Roddenberry, while preaching his utopian message about a future free from greed was writing "lyrics" to the TOS theme song to screw the composer out of royalties. Should it be any surprise the corporations and the people working for them are out to make a dollar too? That's their whole reason for being.
I emailed the article to TrekMovie. They state that it's false, but then again they don't seem to be the most reliable source for information anymore IMHO.
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