There seems to be two camps on this board now - those that are unhappy about how the new film will screw with established Star Trek, and those that tell those people to get over it. Aside from the fact that Trek is personally important to some people there is a very valid reason that an unhappy fanbase is critically important.
The success of a new Star Trek venture is akin to the success of a political campaign. If you don't motivate your base and get a large turnout of your base you won't win. Many believe that a big reason McCain lost the presidential election is that the Democrat base was supermotivated, and the Republican base was undermotivated. Grabbing new voters or bringing people over from the other side is important, but it isn't how you win. (I DO NOT want this thread to degenerate into a political discussion, I'm simply using politics as an analogy). Star Trek isn't much different. Whether it is a new show like Enterprise or a movie like Nemesis that both fell short, success depends on repeat business by the fanbase. With fan support established you can work on expanding it.
Here's why you're wrong, as I wrote about a similar claim in another thread:
You know what the base of Trek fans are? 3 million. That's about how many people were tuning in to ENT at its lowest points in the ratings. So we know that there are around 3 million Trekkies out there who are more or less reliable at even the lowest points of Trek's popularity.
Guess what? This movie is going to need more than 3 million people to be profitable, let alone a hit. Let's say they want numbers akin to Abrams's and Orci's last big hits,
Cloverfield and
Transformers. If they want
Cloverfield numbers, they're going to need to make $80 million; if they want
Transformers numbers, they're going to need to make around $319 million. That's all just the domestic grosses.
Let's assume that there's not much repeat viewings and that most theatres are charging around $8 per ticket and that it's in wide release. That means that to reach
Cloverfield numbers, they're gonna need to attract around 10 million theatre-goers. To make
Transformers numbers, they're going to need to attract almost 40 million theatre-goers.
That means that to make the minimum threshold of success that this creative team has established for itself, they're going to need to attract 7 million more people than can be said to make up the "Trekkie fanbase." They need to attract more than twice as many people as are Trekkies just to meet the
minimum threshold of success they've had in the past. To meet the
maximum threshold of success, they'll need to attract
37 million more theatre-goers than make up the Trekkie fanbase.
Simply put, they're only going to need the Trekkie fanbase if they can't attract anyone else, and even then, the Trekkie fanbase won't save them. Trekkies can only break this film if it absolutely fails to attract non-Trekkies -- and they can't hurt it if it attracts just a few million more theatre-goers than
Cloverfield did. And on top of that, a certain percentage of the fanbase is always going to show up, whether they like it or not, and another percentage is going to like what they see, irrelevant of what people on the Internet say.
Simply put, there aren't enough of us Trekkies to actually make a difference in
Star Trek XI's popularity under anything other than a low-turnout scenario for this film, and even then, we aren't unified enough to really hurt or help it. If this film achieves its goal and gets mainstream success, it doesn't matter if every hard-core Trekkie, all 3 million of us, boycott the thing, because it will still attract tens of millions of others.
S9 started out slow, but like ST:TNG I enjoy watching most of the later seasons over and over again. Most of the TNG based films (other than First Contact) seemed to be flash over substance, so I rarely saw them more than once in the theaters and put them into the same category as the first two seasons of the TNG series. ST:Voy was okay... but to date I haven't seen all the episodes as it wasn't especially compelling in some of it's earlier seasons. Same with ST:Ent, I haven't seen all the episodes and didn't find it compelling.
