Don’t hold out for more Star Trek movies: “They don’t make Marvel money”
By Dan Selcke
Star Trek Beyond came out in theaters in 2016. It was well-reviewed, and featured a cast fans had grown to know and like since they rebooted the Star Trek film franchise in 2009 — people like Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Zoe Saldana.
It didn’t do spectacularly at the box office, though, even though it made hundreds of millions of dollars. Speaking to Games Radar, Beyond writer and star Simon Pegg (Montgomery “Scotty” Scott) offered that as part of the explanation for why we haven’t seen any movies since. “The fact is, Star Trek movies don’t make Marvel money,” he said. “They make maybe $500 million at the most, and to make one now, on the scale they’ve set themselves, is $200 million. You have to make three times that to make a profit.”
Not that people haven’t tried to get a new movie going. There was all that news about Quentin Tarantino maybe making a Star Trek film, but now it sounds like that’s not happening. There have also been reports of Fargo’s Noah Hawley rebooting the movies again with an all-new cast, but there’s nothing certain.
Basically, the movies have “lost momentum,” as Pegg puts it, something he chalks up in part to the loss of Anton Yelchin (Pavel Chekov), who died in 2016. “I think losing Anton [Yelchin] was a huge blow to our little family, and our enthusiasm to do another one might have been affected by that,” he said. “So I don’t know.”
Pegg also had a few things to say about Paramount’s failure to properly promote Beyond. “They didn’t really take advantage of the 50th anniversary,” he said. “The regimen at the time dropped the ball on the promo of the film.”
Basically, there are a whole lotta reasons the Star Trek film franchise is unlikely to continue, at least in the way it has up until now. Happily, it’s doing just fine on TV:
Next. WiC Watches: Star Trek: Picard. dark
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