Paramount=DOUCHEBAGS
Paramount=DOUCHEBAGS
Dec 18Wow, one great way to both enrage the remaining fans of a dying franchise AND destroy a handful of lives at the worst possible time of year is to kill the official Star Trek website and fire all the staff a few weeks before Christmas.
Nicely done, Paramount!
Maybe if we tell them Star Trek is dying…we’d get access to a medical kit. We might be able to use some of the tools to make a weapon!!
Well, that’s that for the Star Wars v. Star Trek war. Paramount is officially telling the world that they’re sick of Star Trek.
This makes it pretty clear that they no longer want to deal with Star Trek as a Star Wars style franchise – they want to deal with it like a regular movie franchise. They don’t want to talk to the fans, they don’t want to have to hear from the actors. If it were making Star Wars bank, maybe they’d keep going, but they’re making regular movie blockbuster money – so, it’s not worth the hassle to them. And corporate pricks that they are, they canned everyone… at Christmas.
Gene wouldn’t have stood for this.
Anyhow, the totally fucked up part is that this is after ten years of “Begone, fan websites! Only WE shall have a Star Trek website of interest and substance.”
There’s probably some good analysis to be done here…I mean, Lucasfilm nurtured the Star Wars franchise into a cottage industry, one that made the prequel films possible. I mean, would the prequels have been made without the books, figures, etc of the nineties?
So there’s a pretty well-defined upside to nurturing a fanbase, in that it can be what allows you to weather the fallow periods between hits and relevance and connection to the mainstream culture.
In that sense, this move seems idiotic…although us discussing it this way is probably a good example of making a mountain out of a molehill.
It would be nice if the release of the new Trek movie could herald an expansion and growth of an existing fandom, but Paramount doesn’t seem interested in that. Anyway.
Well, that’s the other, slim, option – this is a Miller’s Crossing shot to the head of the old Trek series. A complete clearing of the table until the new movie hits.
There are a few telltale moves Paramount has made lately that suggest some internal rethinking of the Star Trek IP – all the merch I’ve seen lately has been mostly TOS, which presumably is better coin. Selling Shatner prior to likeness rights is way better money than trying to sell Picard.
Like you say, with Lucas, it was Lucas at the top making the calls to build a cottage industry. At Paramount, it’s a cycling board of execs – none of them have the interest (or tenure) to build and maintain something like Star Wars. Love or hate the prequels, they were not built by committee (or at least, not in the same way Star Trek has plodded along for the last 20 years.)
Which is where, I’d venture to guess, the lack of even a total nimrod like Rick Berman is hurting Trek–at least when there was one guy at the helm, that’s one dude to go to bat for shit like this, and one dude to ostensibly “guide” the franchise. Right now, like you said, it is a rotating cast of suits, with JJ Abrams just out there praying to v’Ger that he can come up with a decent movie to reignite this thing.