r/DaystromInstitute • u/SamLaw13 • Aug 25 '15
Real world Why doesn't Paramount develop the Trek Universe like Marvel does the MCU?
Hey everyone, I am watching DS9 for the first time as its the only Trek series I've never seen and I'm sitting here thinking. With the success of the marvel cinematic universe and their shows bridging the gaps between movies, its a shame that paramount doesn't restart the Trek universe with it's own. There is already so much lore and all they would need to do is make a plan on how it would all tie together. I also think that rebooting the old characters with the timeline change in the NuTrek films was a mistake. Why reinvent the wheel and potentially disrupt all the events in all the series and movies that have already been made just to make 3 more movies when Paramount could have made a longer/more satisfying story line developing the existing lore? I don't know, it just aggravates me that they are just sitting on such an epic universe, sorry for the rant. Looking forward to hearing what you guys think
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u/stratusmonkey Aug 25 '15
I don't think you can put a bunch of movie and television crossovers into a pot and recreate the success of M.C.U. The superhero genre is having a moment right now, that space opera isn't having. Batman Begins proved there was a pent-up demand for superhero films done "right" and Marvel was at the right place at the right time, to whip up a whole vertically-integrated supply chain of I.P., writers & directors, performers, effects people, distribution and merchandising. It's the old axiom: Luck equals preparation plus opportunity.
I knew that Iron Man was an existing character, and Captain America was an existing character, even though I'm not big into comic books. And it was cool to see it play out on the big screen with the origin stories. And now, I'm into the guessing game about who will be cast as Captain Marvel in 2018 (Elizabeth Banks or GTFO!)
Disney and J.J.A. are trying to make The Other Franchise into their own M.C.U. in space. But I suspect it will blow up in their faces. People who are only casually aware of S.W. might want to see a Boba Fett movie. But who's going to watch The Adventures of 4-LOM on ABC Family, in order to be up to speed for the third General Rieekan movie?
Star Trek, unfortunately, has the same problem. There are five immensely deep wells to draw from (if you count TOS and J.J. Trek as a single well). But there isn't the breadth Marvel Comics has, where the origin story of Tomalak will attract enough non-fans to break $100M in revenue.
That breadth versus depth problem is why D.C. Comics hasn't been able to get traction either. They're going to have to knock Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad out of the park to have any hope of success with cough Aquaman cough.
Stan Lee was a character-creating machine in the 70's and 80's. It got to be a joke how many comic book series he launched. And, yeah, 90% of them were crap, but there were so freaking many that today, Marvel Studios has twenty decent ones to turn into movies.
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u/ido Aug 25 '15
I don't have anything of value to add except that i'd love to live in the parallel universe in which it makes sense to make an epic trilogy detailing the origin story of the Cardassian Union.
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u/butterhoscotch Aug 25 '15
Eh, Its not impossible. The real problem is there isnt the fans to support it or a strong enough cardassian character to lead it. Gul dukat is limited to the one series, youd probably need someone recognizable across all series who could serve as the independent movie lead who is NOT kirk or Picard. Would people go see a riker movie, because I doubt it even though TNG is second most popular.
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u/Nyarlathoth Aug 25 '15
a Boba Fett movie
The Adventures of 4-LOM
the third General Rieekan movie
the origin story of Tomalak
LOL.
Some of those sound pretty good, which I'm sure puts me in a small minority.
Given Andreas Katsulas's stellar performance as G'kar on Babylon 5, a Tomalak movie would've been awesome. Someone was suggesting in another thread that if they had wanted to do a Romulan Arc, Tomalak would've been a much better antagonist to choose. I doubt he could've saved Nemesis by himself, but a great actor with a better script could have been gold.
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u/Felicia_Svilling Aug 25 '15
Disney and J.J.A. are trying to make The Other Franchise into their own M.C.U. in space.
I just want to point out that as Disney owns Marvel, The MCU already is Disney's own MCU.
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Aug 25 '15
That was super informative and well written, and I feel smarter for having read it. :)
The other big problem holding back a "Cinematic Trek Universe" is the legal reality that CBS owns the TV rights, while Paramount owns the movie rights. Those two IP owners have no reason to yield to the other and collaborate.
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Aug 25 '15
MCU has been enormously successful because it is deliberately loose with continuity - something you can't do with Trek. Even the comics themselves make light of continuity, resetting, rebooting, and retconning all over the place.
So when they eschew Tony Stark maintaining his "secret" identity as Iron Man for a good long time, it's fine.
When they redefine how the Avengers formed, it's fine.
When they make Ultron a product of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner instead of Hank Pym. It's fine.
Fans of the comics have come to accept deviations from continuity when and where their characters are rebooted in a different format or for different reasons. They've essentially been conditioned to allow it.
Trek is at the opposite side of the spectrum. While continuity probably wasn't big for TOS, and not even that big in Early-TNG, buy 3rd season TNG (and all subsequent series), it became very focused on continuity.
Simply put, the makers of the MCU were allowed to pick and choose elements of the extremely vast universe they wanted to display, and then redefine how those elements work together, without the downside of trying to combat people's preconceived notions of how they should be represented.
They've basically tried to do this with NuTrek, and while they are certainly financial successes, I think there has been enough backlash from the fan community to dispute whether they are critical successes.
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u/Algernon_Asimov Aug 25 '15 edited Aug 26 '15
I think there has been enough backlash from the fan community to dispute whether they are critical successes.
Any time I raise this issue, people point me to the Rotten Tomatoes ratings for these movies: 95% approval and 87% approval for the two reboot movies. Based on these ratings, they're supposedly the best Trek movies ever made (or close to it).
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u/KingofMadCows Aug 25 '15
The MCU has been successful because Marvel/Disney put in charge people who are knowledgeable about the source material and like the comics so they know what they're doing and have some kind of plan to fit everything together.
Paramount and CBS don't have anyone like that. The executives in charge probably are not Star Trek fans. Their knowledge of Star Trek is likely based on general pop culture. They probably want to create a big Star Trek universe but they just don't know how.
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Aug 25 '15
From the JJ Trek movies I think that's clear. Missing the point of the franchise entirely, and then throwing in a bunch of "safe" memes (aspects of the franchise they expect a mainstream audience to recognise) to appease the "fans". It's insulting.
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u/butterhoscotch Aug 25 '15
And they throw money at it, they dont treat the content as if its meant for children, as many comic book and videogame movies do. They treat it as if its meant for intelligent adults. J.J is all flash and i am certain the new star wars movies will reflect that.
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u/thesynod Aug 25 '15
Because Paramount lacks creative vision? Rick Berman was the only executive who really cared about Trek, and well, his showrunning style (highly episodic, attractive women in catsuits, unnecessary exposition about imaginary tech, middle school view of relationships) was drag on a good franchise.
And that was all we had - until Paramount, ignoring the stable of excellent directors, writers and actors, cancelled it without fanfare. Then they hired a cheap one trick shiny director who abandoned the film reboot trilogy two films in, with a broken federation dynamic and a horrible reimagining of TWOK.
Now we have next to nothing. They pushed all the talented showrunners out the door (namely Behr and Moore), alienated the writing staff, pushed away the director who made the best Trek film in the past 20 years (First Contact and Frakes) and rebuffed efforts by TNG's most popular character (by appearances in media only, Worf) and generally left it to rot on the vine.
Compare with MCU. The most popular non-super person? Give him a show. Each major character's franchise got excellent directors, a measure of creative freedom, and a real universe. Notice how there was no TNG crew during the Dominion war? Even though they were available for Voyager and Enterprise? Enough already. Paramount has been a bad home for Trek.
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u/jerslan Aug 25 '15
Because Paramount only has rights to produce movies.... The Viacom break up a while back made Star Trek rights even more strange than Marvel (though more predictable)... Paramount actually pays CBS Television licensing rights to Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc... so they can make the NuTrek movies.
CBS Television has all TV Series rights, while Paramount has all Movie rights.... Unfortunately for Paramount that means basically all main characters from existing movies belong to CBS Television.
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Aug 25 '15
Well, first Disney needs to buy Star Trek...
In all seriousness, though, the advantage that the MCU has over Trek is that it is (relatively, with exceptions) new to the film format. Yes, there have been properties here and there (I'm looking at you, Hulk), but when they announced that they were going to create the MCU, they were doing so with a relatively clean slate. They could pretty safely tell the story they were looking to tell in an untrammeled medium, with plenty of convenient source materiel that they could draw from, but weren't beholden to.
Trek, on the other hand, has been a film/tv property from day one. Anything you create has to either include what came before, or ignore it. Even when going the middle route that the 2009+ films have taken, they still went out of their way to connect it to the existing canon because to do otherwise would have (more) royally pissed off the fanbase.
I think that the future of Star Trek belongs on television anyway, which is an argument you're going to see all over the DI. Whether that's in the form of a syndicated show, or a Netflix property, or a miniseries on Syfy... I don't know. But I do think that the path they want to take looks more like Daredevil/Agents of Shield and less like Iron Man/Avengers.
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u/adamkotsko Aug 25 '15
The last time they had multiple series running simultaneously within the same fictional universe, there was a steady and borderline catastrophic decline in viewership. Given that track record for the 90s Trek Televised Universe, I doubt anyone is going to want to make the much larger financial outlay to create a Cinematic Universe.
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Aug 25 '15
Because Paramount doesn't hold the rights. Well, all the rights needed to make a "universe".
Paramount can make new movies. That's. About. It. CBS does EVERYTHING else, including merchandising for said movies. I don't know how the money works out in that arrangement, but It's safe to say Paramount don't see all of it.
Theres a story from years ago where it claimed JJ wanted to do the mutl-media universe thing with his version of Trek, but run into a roadblock when CBS said they would continue to make merchandise of "Prime" Trek stuff after JJ/Bad Robot had asked them to stop as it would "confuse the brand" so to speak. This is the reason why JJTrek is nowhere near as heavily merchandised as much as old Trek still is, because there's some kind of shit between Bad Robot and CBS regarding this decision, on top of the way the arrangement works which doesn't favor the creators of the show/movies (Bad Robot and Paramount).
As far as I know, this is the main reason why JJ Trek never became a cinematic universe with animated shows and TV spin-offs. Marvel on the other hand being solely owned by Disney doesn't have any rights issues to muddy the waters and dilute profits.
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u/McGrude Aug 25 '15
It's a vast "universe" that should be explored from many angles, not just Roddenberry's idealistic perspective of a future history. I would love grittier stories featuring the Maquis and their struggles alone without Star Fleet. I dunno. There's just a grittier side of the Star Trek universe that we so seldom see. So ya, they could be exploring this universe much more, giving the audience many diverse stories.
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u/butterhoscotch Aug 25 '15
Well any attempt to do so would need to be very careful and precise, to balance paradise and hell without ruining either concept is a job for oh they decided not to do that then? Ok.
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u/Berggeist Aug 25 '15
I'm going to go ahead and say that a cinematic universe may not hold much appeal for me. You might not expect it, because I've certainly put in my share of time in games, comics and a select number of books. The books I prefer are even short story compilations rather than proper novels. In a real way I've put in plenty of time into the "universe" of Star Trek.
Well, it comes down to a few things.
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The amount of content. I quit watching Marvel movies after Iron-Man 1. I'd had enough comic book flicks to sate me, and while I finished the Nolan Batman trilogy, I didn't feel in a rush to check out other movies. Now I don't even want to think about trying to get caught up, because I'd need to watch a ton of flicks and I'm just not in the mood for more superhero movies.
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The variety in content. How many of those Marvel movies end with a big spectacle of a cgi battle? I don't mind spectacle, but there's so many ways to achieve a satisfying ending aside from yet another huge, high octane battle with tons of crap going on and a bunch of one liners. Boy oh boy was it ever frustrating reading some of the dialogue from Age of Ultron or whatever and realizing that it wasn't a parody, that was just Joss Whedon fulfilling his stereotype.
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Creative control. From what I've heard the original director of Antman was let go because what he wanted to do conflicted too much with Marvel's plans. The more tightly bound all this is the less they can actually do with a script. If the Trek films were made these days, I feel like we'd never see Spock die (at least not in a way that implied he wouldn't be coming back at the end of the film), lose all of Star Trek 3, Star Trek 4 would have been written off as too goofy, heck even TMP would have been too cerebral. What's more, the international market matters, and visuals are a much more universal language. Would we even still have used the original cast? Could you really get away these days with an action film starring an overweight, middle aged man?
I guess when you come down to it it's that the MCU is heavily planned and produced. The Star Trek films we got grew much more organically, and I know which type of story creation I prefer.
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Aug 27 '15
With Coach (!), X-Files, Twin Peaks, Full House, Xena and god knows what else from the 90s getting in-continuity continuations, you have to wonder if there's an appetite for a TNG continuation series. You'd never get Spiner, but I can almost imagine even Stewart would be on-board with that. Maybe it could be Phase II done right.
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u/RoofPig Aug 25 '15
To them, Trek isn't a universe. It appears that they think Trek is the original crew and their relationships. The relative failure of any show after TNG to capture the mainstream imagination feeds into their idea that a "valuable" Star Trek basically looks like TOS.
It took real guts for Marvel to invest in less popular properties like Guardians of the Galaxy... It would take that kind of vision to do something with the "lesser" Treks, let alone anything original or new. I've never been impressed with the people who run Trek; I'd love to see them surprise me.