It’s 2024 And Already Star Trek’s Starting to Look Very Different
Paramount appears to lack any cohesive strategy for the immediate future of the franchise
We’ve just begun the new year, and already the landscape of the Star Trek franchise appears very different than it did just 12 months ago.
More than that, we’re left to try to deduce what it might look like in the months and years to come.
Certainly, we’re on-track to see less new content going forward. Star Trek: Discovery will stream its fifth and final season later this year while Star Trek: Picard concluded last year with its blockbuster third season.
Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds are likely to continue, and the forthcoming new Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is set to join them.
And the one-off Star Trek: Section 31 original Paramount Plus movie featuring Academy Award winner Michelle Yeoh and her character, Phillipa Georgiou, reportedly recently began prepping for production.
Yet clearly, Paramount’s attention to — and vibe with — the franchise is a far cry from the excited announcements of impending new Star Trek that the studio was lavishing us with — seemingly every few months — just a couple of short years ago.
Meanwhile, Star Trek: Prodigy has become the true Cinderella story of the franchise. The animated series — in the span of a few short months — has gone from being not only canceled but entirely erased outright from the Paramount Plus streaming service, to landing with aplomb at its new home at Netflix where it’s quickly become a Top 10 series and showrunners are now talking publicly about it running seven seasons or more.
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Prodigy’s success at Netflix only serves as one illustration of the absolute chaos and lack of cohesion with which Paramount is managing the franchise.
Paramount’s once-lofty goal of making its own streaming service the home for all Star Trek lies in absolute ruins.
Paramount Plus just suffered another indignity. All six of the Star Trek movies featuring the original cast, as well as the four starring the Next Generation crew, have fallen off the streamer. And not for the first time.
If you want to watch any of those films, you'll need to jump off Paramount Plus and sign up for HBO’s competing MAX streaming service.
Even the end of Discovery has been ignominious. The cast and crew involved with the series weren’t even informed of Paramount’s decision to end it until after Season 5 had already been wrapped, and they had to go in and try to shoehorn a proper series finale only after the fact.
With Paramount itself in financial trouble, and these days just looking to survive, there’s scant sign that it’s working with any current plans for Star Trek. Except, perhaps, keep running it on the cheap.
If there’s anything to the rumors of an impending buyout of Paramount, hopefully new owners only will treat the franchise with more care and kindness.
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