Amph JJ Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness

I just paraphrased what other people had said. I'm not sure if it's a direct quote-- or if it came from Roddenberry or someone else involved with Trek or a fan. I think an anecdote from Patrick Stewart illustrates it well. When he was first cast as Picard, an idiot reporter asked Roddenberry at a press conference, "Wouldn't they have cured baldness by the 24th century?"

Roddenberry responded, "Shut the **** up." ...Well, no. He said, "In the 24th century, no one would care." I get the impression in these movies that Kirk would say, "Hahaha, look at baldy!" and then adjust his toupee.

That's not to say humans should be "perfect," although Roddenberry sometimes got those notions which is why he was rightly kept the hell away from scripts most of the time.

 

Fun factoid: (since Guy brought Stewart and the baldness question up) When Stewart went in to audition for Picard he did do so with a toupee on. Sometime during that audition he was either asked to remove the toupee or he asked if he could remove it (It's been awhile since I read it, so I forget precisely how the story went), and removed the hairpiece. Evidently those involved with casting liked the au natural look, since he got the part sans toupee.

 

Well, he was better than evil Romulan Bruce Banner

 

To be fair, Original Kirk AND Shatner would probably all do the same thing.

 

Eh, Final Frontier Kirk maybe, 'cause it was a Shatner ego fest.

"What does a man without a magnificent head of hair need with a starship?"

 

I NEED MY PAIN!

 

I thought that was actually the best (and one of like two "good") scene in the whole film, even though it made no sense how the other characters could see the visions. Not saying much, I know.

 

What's the other one?

 

I-- um-- er-- well, come to think of it, it's just the line, "What does God need with a starship?"

 

Is that the one where Kirk climbs the mountain at the beginning? Because that is a good scene as well.

 

He shows that stupid rock who the real El Capitan is.

 

There's also Bones saying "You don't ask the Almighty for his ID"

 

Loved the camping scenes (which is why I can never really trash the film, regardless of how WTF-y the overall 'god' plot is). Very good character moments in those.

 

Per dp4m 's return on budget numbers, Star Trek into Darkness is definitely shaping up to be potentially the second worst-performing Trek film ever, somewhere in the ST IX or ST V range.

Domestically, it's likely to squeak to $200 million. Maybe it will do slightly better than 09 Trek abroad and make $150-170 million. If it makes $370 million worldwide, it will be about on par with Insurrection. Even if it earns another $100 million on ancillary revenue, it will be an extremely marginal performer.



ST II (OC) 8.82
ST IV (OC) 6.33
ST III (OC) 5.44
ST VI (OC) 3.59
ST VII (NG + S) 3.37
ST VIII (NG) 3.24
Star Trek (OC) 3.02
ST XI (NC + N) 2.56
<<<<<ST XII (NC+N) ~1.95
ST IX (NG) 1.93
ST V (OC) 1.91
ST X (NG) 1.12

OC = original cast
NG = Next Generation cast
NG + S = Next Gen + Shatner
NC + N) = new cast + Nimoy

 

That's also assuming we have the proper budget as well; marketing numbers are a bit shaky usually, iirc.

What's shocking to me, in preparation of checking Man of Steel is how in the name of Zeus' butthole did Superman Returns cost 270 million dollars? Did they roll all of the abortive attempts at making a Superman film into that?

 

It's not the "best preforming Star Trek" because look at what it went up against: Disney/Marvel's Iron Man 3 and Fast 6.

 

would not be surprised if that were the case, that the development costs of all the failed interim efforts were piled into the total.

 

So, what you're saying is those movies are better than STID? Because competition theoretically should be agnostic if one movie is dramatically better than the others...

Or, to put another way, The Wrath of Khan opened the week after Rocky III and the same weekend as Poltergeist and the week before E.T. then Blade Runner shortly thereafter. Blade Runner didn't do as well, but the first four were all in the top-10 for the year...

 

Oh no, I'm not saying that at all. But I'm saying is that it went up against Disney's followup to Iron Man after The Avengers and then you also had Fast 6 (which I didn't think that was good at all and I do not understand why it makes so much money) and Star Trek landed itself right in the dead zone between those two. I think Into Darkness was vastly superior to those two movies.

 

It was kind of the same way with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It cost $40 million to make in 1979 (a big deal at the time), but the costs of scuttled Trek revival projects like the aborted Star Trek: Phase II series (which had scripts, test footage, and a replacement Vulcan character if Leonard Nimoy didn't want to come back to play Spock-long story) were rolled into the film's final budget.

These things happen in Hollywood, I guess. Hollywood accounting, I suppose.

 

With those numbers I foresee an end to Trek movies (for the time being) and a return to TV. But then again I'm really bad at predicting the future.

 

CBS has TOS episodes on its website. I'm going to guess that they can only be watched in the US. Here's a link to Space Seed (the Khan episode), for anyone out there who hasn't seen it.

http://www.cbs.com/shows/star_trek/video/619914964/star-trek-the-original-series-space-seed

 

Half of that $270M is probably what would have gone to Nick Cage and Beyonce if they had indeed ended up playing Superman and Lois Lane (which was rumored that Beyonce was up for when Cage was attached to his version of Superman before it was scuttled)

 

I really, really think it's a bit premature, if not wrong altogether, to say that the Abrams reboot is a failure in terms of box office receipts. Studios don't necessarily have a set formula to measure a film's "success" as far as I know, and there's always DVD/Blu-ray sales, licensing it to HBO and Netflix, etc. Despite the fact that I didn't like it, most critics and most audiences did, and that does count a great deal, so.

That said, I'd definitely like an original TV show set in the "prime" universe with new characters because TV lends itself better to Trek and... most stories in general. A semi-serialized format of 12-15 episodes-- maybe a season-long arc with one-shots in-between-- would be great. It would absolutely have to be put in the right hands (see: someone who will keep the idealism) for me to like it, though.