Does Star Trek Still Need to Be a Movie Franchise? The Eternal Debate

There are as we write this some 947 episodes of Star Trek content available to watch, stretching across Star Trek: The Original Series to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, totaling something like 820 hours of viewing. There are also 13 theatrical Star Trek movies in circulation, plus one direct-to-streaming movie, which rack up another roughly 27 hours or so of sci-fi adventures. While both numbers are formidable in their own right, it’s still clear which medium Gene Roddenberry’s original vision has prospered in the most.

David Ellison, the new owner of what is now called Paramount Skydance, said at a recent press event to commemorate the merger that returning Star Trek to the big screen—from which it has been absent for nearly a decade—is a priority for him. And he wouldn’t bee alone. There are two new Trek movies currently in development, with both having been stalled for several years. The first is a fourth adventure for the cast that rebooted the franchise in 2009; the other a film featuring all-new characters. The question about either, or some third option, is this: should Paramount even bother with a new Star Trek film?

Small Screen Trek vs. Big Screen Trek

Although this year saw the widely panned movie Star Trek: Section 31 premiere on Paramount+, there has not been a Trek film released in theaters since 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, which despite coming out during the property’s 50th anniversary underperformed at the box office with a lukewarm $343 million worldwide gross. After that, all attempts at developing a fourth movie starring the 21st century cast that rebooted the franchise in petered out. Even a proposed film directed by Quentin Tarantino proved unable to escape that spatial rift known as development hell.

Meanwhile, after not having a series on the air since 2005, Trek suddenly found its way back to the small screen again as the flagship IP for Paramount’s newly launched streaming service (called CBS All Access at the time). There have been no less than five Trek shows since 2017 (six if you count the Short Treks anthology series), and while efforts like Star Trek: Discovery have proved divisive among fans, more new shows like Starfleet Academy (an idea which has been kicked around as far back as 1989 for both film and TV) are on the way.

The problem for Star Trek going forward is the same as it’s always been: this is a niche property, a subgenre all its own within the larger universe of science fiction. The films have, on balance, done respectable business at the box office: Star Trek Into Darkness earned $467 million worldwide in 2013 while even Star Trek: The Motion Picture raked in $139 million back in 1979, the equivalent of $618.5 million in today’s dollars. The franchise has earned nearly $2.3 billion over 13 entries. But on an individual level, no Trek movie has ever entered the vaunted billion-dollar club enjoyed regularly (in the 2010s anyway) by entries from other sci-fi brands like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, or Transformers.

When you put that against the rising cost of producing the films—Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond cost a staggering $190 million and $185 million respectively to make—it’s clear that Star Trek cannot compete at the same level as those other brands. Reducing the price tag on the movies might result in them looking cheaper and less worthy of the other blockbusters out there. In the meantime, the TV shows (still relatively costly, but not like the films) are more manageable and theoretically serve to continually draw subscribers to their platform.

What Is Star Trek?

The other concern is that Star Trek, as originally conceived, was an idea-driven show about exploring space and tackling contemporary issues against a futuristic context. Many of the early movies featured thrills and spectacle, but they also stayed fairly close to that premise. When J.J. Abrams rebooted the franchise in 2009, the emphasis shifted heavily to action-driven plots about revenge-fueled villains, with Abrams and company going as far as hiring Fast and Furious director Justin Lin to helm Star Trek Beyond. The result was a movie that while pretty good still alienated a large swath of the original fanbase and didn’t exactly inspire a next generation of Trekkers.

Previous to that, Star Trek Into Darkness turned out to be a half-baked stealth remake of the most beloved film in the franchise, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which further enraged longtime fans. Abrams, foreshadowing what he would later do with his two Star Wars movies, apparently felt that recycling the greatest hits from the franchise’s storied past was a better option than coming up with fresh new ideas of his own.

Over several seasons of a weekly TV series, you can arguably get away with different kinds of episodes. If one episode leans heavily into battles with Klingon warships, the producers can follow it up the next week with an emotional, character-driven piece about Spock mind-melding with some kind of luminous new form of life. But a movie is different: you have two hours to be all things to all people, at least when we’re talking about tentpole-sized films, and Star Trek was never about casting the widest possible net on the small screen.

That’s why the most recent crop of Star Trek movies eventually drove away lifelong devotees, but it’s also why films like the first six starring the OG cast wouldn’t work today either. And that’s ultimately why Star Trek, in the long run, is probably better suited for staying exclusively on TV.

Having said that, small-screen Trek has its problems right now as well: after a promising first season, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has devolved (we’re in the middle of Season 3 as we write this) into a muddled hodgepodge of conflicting tones, derivative gimmicks, and cheap nostalgia. It also remains to be seen if the upcoming Starfleet Academy just turns out to be teen soap opera in space dock. So the best path forward right now might be shoring up the franchise on TV, where it prospered for so long, before venturing out into the final frontier of multiplexes again.