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News The ongoing next Star Trek movie thread

My preference for a full reboot is not to bring legacy characters into the shows and movies. Let this new universe stand on its own two feet.

But companies are never going to do that. They will always monetize nostalgia.
 
Wouldn't it be better if they just got people who cared about what they were making?
You can care about what you're making without being beholden to decades of continuity like a creative stranglehold. It's just time to move on. The "prime universe" conceit on the new shows has been so limiting because you know so many things can't happen.

My preference for a full reboot is not to bring legacy characters into the shows and movies. Let this new universe stand on its own two feet.

But companies are never going to do that. They will always monetize nostalgia.
I just don't think there's a major motion picture sized audience for Star Trek that isn't Kirk and Spock. At least not right now. Maybe if you have a really successful film they can go the cinematic universe route and have movies about other crews of new characters having adventures.
 
You can care about what you're making without being beholden to decades of continuity like a creative stranglehold. It's just time to move on. The "prime universe" conceit on the new shows has been so limiting because you know so many things can't happen.
We only know that things can't happen because they keep making prequels. Not that it's always a bad idea. Over on Star Wars, the prequel series that had to lead directly into a film ended up being a creative high point.

Okay, here's a premise for a movie: the heroes of the Starship Banana go to the Mango Cluster 20 months from Earth and encounter an exciting mystery. What things can't happen? Well they can't blow up the Earth or destroy the Federation, but they're months away, and they wouldn't do that in Trek movie anyway. The crew includes a member of an alien species called the Strawberrians whose ancestors came from the Mango Cluster, and they have a secret. Does the secret have any danger of contradicting Strawberrian canon? No, we've never met that species before.

There's also a Cardassian on board the Banana. Is there any risk of the writer being straightjacketed by canon there? Yes, but they presumably put them there because they already know the Cardassians and want to make use of them. Otherwise they could just replace them with a Pineapplean.

Just make the ships and effects look appropriate for the era, don't have characters say "No one has ever encountered something like this before", it's not too hard to play within the rules.
 
We only know that things can't happen because they keep making prequels. Not that it's always a bad idea. Over on Star Wars, the prequel series that had to lead directly into a film ended up being a creative high point.

Okay, here's a premise for a movie: the heroes of the Starship Banana go to the Mango Cluster 20 months from Earth and encounter an exciting mystery. What things can't happen? Well they can't blow up the Earth or destroy the Federation, but they're months away, and they wouldn't do that in Trek movie anyway. The crew includes a member of an alien species called the Strawberrians whose ancestors came from the Mango Cluster, and they have a secret. Does the secret have any danger of contradicting Strawberrian canon? No, we've never met that species before.

There's also a Cardassian on board the Banana. Is there any risk of the writer being straightjacketed by canon there? Yes, but they presumably put them there because they already know the Cardassians and want to make use of them. Otherwise they could just replace them with a Pineapplean.

Just make the ships and effects look appropriate for the era, don't have characters say "No one has ever encountered something like this before", it's not too hard to play within the rules.
Entirely fair. It’s just that after a certain point, many franchises feel the need to keep hitting “trademark” buttons — maybe also for name recognition, once they become common enough for that to be a draw? So the movie where the Enterprise faces the just-invented Son’a probably won’t get as many eyeballs as when they encounter !THE KLINGONS! for the 40th time.

Probably. It probably helps when a franchise doesn’t have as many well-known trademarks to keep hitting. So James Bond can *usually* keep facing new guys instead of it always being SPECTRE.

Personally, I’d rather Trek go to a new planet far away from everybody else every time. Probably won’t have as much of a mass draw, though.
 
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Entirely fair. It’s just that after a certain point, many franchises feel the need to keep hitting “trademark” buttons
There's definitely a conflict between Star Trek's premise of boldly going where no one has gone before, and Hollywood's philosophy of timidly remaking or adapting things that everyone has seen before.
 
There's definitely a conflict between Star Trek's premise of boldly going where no one has gone before, and Hollywood's philosophy of timidly remaking or adapting things that everyone has seen before.
But also economic realism. My ideal Star Trek story is the one where the Enterprise spends two hours really, seriously exploring Weird Planet X And Its Strange Unique Culture. That wouldn’t have flown even on TOS; I think Roddenberry outright said so all the way back in Whitfield’s The Making of Star Trek. (Why yes, I do rather like Doctor Who’s “The Web Planet”, funny you should ask.)
 
I was thinking more 'Forbidden Planet' than 'The Web Planet', mostly because whenever I think of Web Planet I get a terrible headache.

Doctor_Who_Marathon_The_Web_Planet.jpg

Oh no, the headache's coming back!!
 
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