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by Olorin
Wow, this thread sure got active again all of a sudden--that post about the movie idea was bound to do it.
I honestly thought after Nemesis tanked, they'd give Star Trek a long rest, especially since they're pulling the plug on its current TV incarnation. Of course, Nemesis came out at the end of 2002, and if a new movie comes out at the end of 2007, like that post said, that would be 5 years, which is an eternity in movie land, longer than they've ever gone between ST movies (Insurrection to Nemesis was only 4 years).
I don't want the movie to tank. I'd much rather have a good movie. If it is really lousy, what's left of the fan base will dissipate, and then Trek will really be up the creek without a warp core.
The movie idea (assuming it's legit and it gets made) is atypical of Paramount's reaction to a flop in the series. After ST:TMP came out way over budget, Paramount took creative control away from Roddenberry, brought in Harve Bennett, and turned Star Trek over to the studio's TV division for future movies. And that was on the heels of a movie that did the biggest box office of all of them! When ST V flopped, Harve Bennett took the fall, since obviously Shatner wasn't going to, and the cast whipped up fan rebellion against Bennett's Starfleet Academy idea. Paramount put some else in as producer and brought back Nicholas Meyer, who wrote/directed II and cowrote IV, to direct. Insurrection under-performed, and so the reins were given to Stuart Baird for Nemesis (who supposedly know so little about Trek he thought Data was an alien). Also, some marketing genius at Paramount decided to sandwich Nemeis between The Two Towers and Harry Potter, where it was sure to get crushed. So Nemesis flopped hard.
So I think Paramount has had 2 failures in a row already, and their solution is to dump the NG cast and bring in a cast of (presumably cheap) unknowns. How they arrive at these decisions, I'm not sure. I don't know how in touch with their audience they are. After Nemesis, did they perceive a sentiment that the fans were tired of Picard and his crew? Or did they just arbitrarily assign the blame to them?
I still think they should give ST a long rest. If they did that, they'd have to come up with a new cast, since the Next Gen folks would be too old (as would probably all the other casts). If they won't wait a good long while, I think probably the better idea than getting rid of the Next Gen cast would be to get rid of Berman. He's simply been doing ST too long and can't tell a good idea from a bad one any more, apparently. Sidebar on how he came to be in charge of ST: he's Roddenberry's hand-picked successor. Unlike the original cast movies after ST:TMP, Roddenberry did have creative control over TNG, and early in its run, as his health began to fail badly, he groomed Berman and handed him the reins, which Paramount has honored to this day.
The problem is, who'd replace Berman? He had a lot of underlings working on the various series, with mixed but generally good results, but his hand was on their shoulders the entire time, and I think if any of them were running ST, it would simple be Berman Light. I'd be inclined to say that the person I'd most trust to helm ST would be Leonard Nimoy, but I think his familiarities and sensibilities are most in tune with the original cast, and presumably they're out of the picture for any future movies.
Last edited by
Olorin on Sat Mar 12, 2005 5:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: clarity
"Olorin I was in the West that is forgotten...."