Watchmojo says Star Trek has The Number 1 Fandom
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If only they had given Kirstie Alley the money she wanted. Of the new characters, she was the strongest on screen. But the producers didn't make the effort to search for interesting talent, instead going for 2nd-rate blandness, because it was cheaper and easier.
Comparing figures across decades without adjusting for inflation gives you no information.
It is a good point that most of the Trek films involved older actors.
Up until the announcement of further Star Wars movies, the novels were canon for all intents and purposes. Disney is ignoring them because they don't want to force young viewers to have read them to understand things. Nobody should be surprised by this, and nobody should let this shake their opinion that the novels are canon.
The obsessive need for everything associated with a franchise to be cleanly integrated into a single monolithic universe is the difference between a fan and a fanatic.
And it's not just a matter of young people. Ninety-percent of the movie-going audience,young or old, including folks who have seen every single SW movie multiple times, are not going to be familiar with the books, so it would be silly to worry about keeping your big new Major Motion Pictures consistent with stories that most of the audience has never heard of.
It's not an artistic choice, it's a practical one. It's all about orders of magnitude. Movies are seen by millions. Books are read by thousands. So the movies trump the books. Always.
It's not about "canon." It's about how things work in the real world.
It's funny, but when I think of the TOS movies, it seems that for a franchise that had a knack for creating and casting younger characters and doing a good job with them, none of those characters went anywhere! (Unless you count Chekov in Season 2.)
David, Saavik, Ilia, Decker, and you know who else SEEMED like a potentially good character? Xon! Of course, I'm basing that on a multi-second length screen test that I saw, but again, I thought they did a great job!
David, Saavik, Ilia, Decker, and you know who else SEEMED like a potentially good character? Xon! Of course, I'm basing that on a multi-second length screen test that I saw, but again, I thought they did a great job!
Xon just evolved in Data on TNG.
Here you go: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/04/01/every-star-trek-film-charted/
Into Darkness, The Motion Picture and Star Trek are the big players.
It's worth noting that George Lucas approved the idea of Star Wars novels when someone explained to him how the Star Trek ones had no bearing on the TV and film parts of the franchise. He refers to SW novels as a "parallel universe" in old interviews http://www.canonwars.com/SWCanon2.html
As has been said. Trek isn't really as accessible to the non fans like the other franchises are. Whether it's because of content, or stigma, is up for debate. But that list specifically doesn't say it's the biggest fan base. Just that the fan base it has is the most devout, with Star Wars 2nd. And that makes sense to me.
Shut up.
Why is the WSJ reporting on Star Trek fandom?
No it doesn't!
Star Trek finds itself in an interesting position.
There are enough fans to make a successful TV show or movie, but only if all of us watch at the same time -- TNG or TMP.
When we splinter (beyond TVH at the movies, and beyond TNG for the series), things start to get risky for the studio.
So the question then becomes : do we make the films on the cheap for the fans and hope some good word of mouth gets us over the line? (TWOK---->NEMESIS). Or, do we throw serious dollars at it and hope to take the whole thing into the mainstream (JJ Trek)?
There is no easy answer I guess. I'm thrilled to see the JJ approach, but the fans are divided, and -- if you believe the rumours -- there was a serious post mortem done on the financial performance of Star Trek Into Darkness. Expectations were not met.
I would say this though : the failure of the TNG films was because they tried to have it both ways. They wanted to churn out 2 hour long TV episodes made on the cheap, but, perhaps in some attempt to reach out to the wider audience decided to turn Picard into Bruce Willis, and Data into...well god knows what - some kind of comedy sidekick? As a result, the mainstream wouldn't pay to watch a TV production on the big screen, and TNG's fans were left wondering what the hell happened to the characters and thoughtful stories I loved on TV? The result : me and two others had the room to ourselves on opening night for NEM at one of the biggest cinema complexes in Melbourne's CBD.
There are enough fans to make a successful TV show or movie, but only if all of us watch at the same time -- TNG or TMP.
When we splinter (beyond TVH at the movies, and beyond TNG for the series), things start to get risky for the studio.
So the question then becomes : do we make the films on the cheap for the fans and hope some good word of mouth gets us over the line? (TWOK---->NEMESIS). Or, do we throw serious dollars at it and hope to take the whole thing into the mainstream (JJ Trek)?
There is no easy answer I guess. I'm thrilled to see the JJ approach, but the fans are divided, and -- if you believe the rumours -- there was a serious post mortem done on the financial performance of Star Trek Into Darkness. Expectations were not met.
I would say this though : the failure of the TNG films was because they tried to have it both ways. They wanted to churn out 2 hour long TV episodes made on the cheap, but, perhaps in some attempt to reach out to the wider audience decided to turn Picard into Bruce Willis, and Data into...well god knows what - some kind of comedy sidekick? As a result, the mainstream wouldn't pay to watch a TV production on the big screen, and TNG's fans were left wondering what the hell happened to the characters and thoughtful stories I loved on TV? The result : me and two others had the room to ourselves on opening night for NEM at one of the biggest cinema complexes in Melbourne's CBD.
I keep hearing this but I don't think there's any truth to it. If the film struggled that badly, why would Paramount give $170 million to a first time director for a sequel?
I'm not sure about that. Comic book fans tend to be divided by generational issues. Want to to start a fight? Go to any comic-book message board and ask who the "real" Green Lantern or Batgirl or Flash is? Trust me, it will get ugly fast.
Or ask the BUFFY fans who Buffy's true soulmate is: Spike or Angel? Again, things will get heated fast.
Any sort of fandom is going to generate feuds and schisms. It's just the nature of the beast.
Not struggled. Just didn't do as well as expected.
As I said above, I can't see how anything would be different if the movie made $1.2 billion dollars or something similarly insane. Would be have a concurrent TV series? Probably not, if there's even the tiniest grain of truth to this (vaguely similar issues are preventing Fox from cashing in on X-Men toys)
Had Into Darkness disappointed significantly, the threequel would be in eternal limbo.
TV Tropes even lists them: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BrokenBase
I think the only happy fandom is the nonexistent one. Trekkies have been crying foul since TAS, TMP and the very first novels for diverging from assumptions made in popular fanfiction at the time. Harve Bennett and Nick Meyer got the J.J. Abrams "Not a Trekkie!" treatment in 1981. And these Wrath of Khan criticisms from Interstat so closely match the ones recently levelled at Into Darkness that Opus made a thread where he just switched the names and nobody noticed.
Worst. Whats the criteria?
Who has the best?
In all these very subjective polls you have to know the criteria.
Mudang Harada
Lieutenant Commander
Could Trek be as big as it was today as a TV show with all the competition out there? Enterprise would be dead after ep 5 and so would VOY and TNG. Even if it's very well written and acted it's a gamble and i understand why they are hesitant about a Live Action tv show.
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