Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in
You're making the assumption that TMP got a big budget because it was a Star Trek movie. That's not true. At the time, Star Trek didn't have that much of a cachet. It had gained a fair amount of success in syndicated reruns, but it hadn't yet become as huge as it would later as a result of the movies and TNG.
The reason TMP got a big budget -- indeed, the reason it got made as a feature film at all rather than a TV revival -- was because of Star Wars. After SW was a huge hit, rival studios wanted their own big-budget sci-fi properties to compete with it. So Paramount took the sci-fi property it already had, Star Trek, and tried to position it as a big-budget rival to Star Wars. They even hired the genius behind SW's effects, John Dykstra, to help create TMP's effects. (Note that Disney's The Black Hole, another big-budget, FX-laden space movie, came out in the same year, and Universal's Buck Rogers TV-pilot movie got a theatrical release that year as well, as had its Battlestar Galactica pilot the previous year.)
So if there had been no Trek project in development, Paramount would still have wanted to make a big-budget space opera to rival SW. So as long as this hypothetical non-Trek version of the V'Ger story had come out in 1979, it would still have gotten quite a lot of money thrown at it and would still have had elaborate, top-notch visual effects.
I rather strenuously disagree with most of this. Trek's recognition as a phenomena was at an all-time high in 76, with the NYT bestseller list evidence along with something like 140 or 150 countries playing it in syndication and the orbiter being renamed. 30,000 folks at a Chicago convention? Thirty THOUSAND! Even when it was planned as Kaufman's PLANET OF THE TITANS, before SW came out and Par retreated (briefly) to the Phase 2 TV notion, the budget was something like 10 mil (Shatner was telling audiences the budget was 8-10 mil in 76 & 77 on tour, when he was describing something that sounded like THE GOD THING or Ellison's pitch, both of which predate TITANS.)
During the ModernTrek era of TNG popularity, the show was certainly known, but it wasn't the electric live-wire effect present in the 70s, where it was like a wild thing that even people who didn't get it were intrigued ...
Anyway, Paramount cancelled TITANS after SW came out, because they though they had blown it and been beaten to the punch. So they didn't see a craze emerging at all, which again points to WTF were they smoking/thinking?
It went to 15 mil when it went back to feature status WITH Wise (apparently budget did not go up with Bob Collins still slated.)
Somebody can check on this, but i think the budget went to 20 while shooting was going on (maybe CHEKOV'S ENTERPRISE has that info?)
They kept throwing money at it because they HAD to deliver on 12/7/79, which is why it was allowed to go from big-budget to INSANELY big budget (plus you have overages from the earlier attempts and all of Phase 2's work, including pay or play contracts with the regulars, all of which might well account for 10-12 mil out of 44-45. Most of the set work was charged to p2, since the published budget for art direction on the movie is actually quite small as listed in TMP, once you discount the huge amount they spent on the memory wall and trench that didn't even appear in the final cut.) That's why you have so much blown on vfx, with triple-time and such for months on end -- they had to get the movie done on time, there was no other option given the advances paid them by cinemas.
If, as a CFQ reviewer pointed out back in 1980, Paramount had released this film as STELLAR VOYAGES and it had no cache or history, it probably would not have been received even half as well as it was critically, and certainly wouldn't have generated the box-office.
AFAIK, the only time Paramount has ever thrown money at a non-franchise space feature is EVENT HORIZON, on which they spent more than they had on any TREK film up to that point (at the time they said 75 mil, but it might be a little less ... significant sequences were dropped or amended to even accomplish that pic on the large budget), and that was a huge mistake b.o wise (give Paul Anderson money?)
