I just read a story in a recent issue of a trade magazine, thaat Paramount
has decided there will be no more ST:TNG Star Trek movies.  Apparently the
last one, Star Trek: Insurrection, under performed at the box office, and
the suits told exec. producer Rick Berman that any future movies would
have to be done much cheaper.  Specifically, they wanted to cut down on
cast costs by axing Patrick Stewart.  Stewart, as Picard, made $15 million
for doing the last film (about triple what anyone else made).  So they
suggested making the next movie with Riker (Jonathan Frakes) as Captain,
and saying Picard retired or died or something.  They also wanted to cut
way back on the special effects budget and .etc  Of course Berman said,
"who would want to see a STN:TNG movie *without* Picard"?  So there are
now no plans for a new Star Trek movie at any time in the near future.

Berman is instead planning the next Star Trek series, which is rumored to
be the Star Trek: The Starfleet Academy Years series which would feature
new actors playing the young Kirk, Spock, and McCoy when they were in
Starfleet Academy.

Ugh!

21 responses total.

  No loss (to me at least) to hear that there won't be any more ST movies.

  The proposed new series, though, sounds not only frighteningly bad but
  also like it is, quite possibly, the most effective way they could think
  of to completely alienate the ST fan base (assuming the series will be as
  bad as it is likely to be..)

It sound like Paramount wants to beat the ST franchise to death. Why not make
a wacky sitcom with Lwaxana Troi while we're at it?

Does anyone remember a film called something like "Young Sherlock 
Holmes"?  The Starfleet Academy idea sounds just as bad.

I'm sure that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy would be hanging around together 
all the time, the same way they did in all the post-series movies, in 
complete contradiction to military reality, which says that people get 
reassigned and move on all the time.  (The better Trek fan fiction 
recognizes this, and deals with things like accidental encounters 
between old friends years later.)

Is there any "canon" on what the 3 amigos were doing prior to cohabitation
abord the Enterprise?  All the way back to SFA?

Starfleet Academy has been kicked around as the setting for a new
Star Trek TV series for a couple of years.  But this is the first
I've heard that it would include younger versions of Kirk, Spock and 
McCoy.  Putting it there in time would be a major set and costume 
design headache, if nothing else.  
And then there is the continuity mess: you 
couldn't have Klingons except as bad guys; you couldn't have 
Romulans at all.  No Borg, and probably no Cardassians or Bajorans.
 
No, start over with a bunch of young hunks and babes playing
entirely new characters.
"Starfleet: 90210" or "Starfleet: Friends" or "Starfleet Place" or...
 :)

        So Colm Neely (Miles O'Brien on DS9) might have a job afterall?

I think they should have let the Dominion or the Borg or some such take
over the Federation, Star Fleet and Earth.  Then do a series focused on
a small number of assorted rebels fighting to break the new
evil-guys-in-charge Federation.

  That might've been interesting but it was Never Going to Happen..

  I think DS9 is about as dark and gritty as Star Trek is ever going
  to get (and not by coincidence it's about the only one of the series
  I can stand to watch anymore (although that distinction is largely
  moot in my current voluntarily TV-less state..))

  As far as having a "wacky sitcom based on Lwaxana (sp?) Troi":
  that sounds uncomfortably close to TNG as it is..  hypothetical
  writer's meeting:

    Writer 1:   We need a plot for next week's episode!
    Writer 2:   You know the rules..  Spin the wheel!

    [Writer 1 spins a large wheel at the back of the room.
    The pointer clicks by slots labelled "Q" and "Mysterious
    Form of Energy" before settling on "Mrs. Troi"]

    Writer 1:   Damn!  Not *again*!!
    Writer 2:   Well, at least they're easy to write.  C'mon, let's
                go down to the "I Love Lucy" archives..

    [The following week]

    Lwaxana Troi:  Why can't I go to the bridge?  I want to go to the bridge!
                   Waaaaaaah!  Jean-Luc!
    Capt. Picard:  Lucy, I tell you before, you no can come to the club!
                   <ahem..> I mean:  Mrs. Troi, you will please leave the
                   bridge at once and remain in your quarters for the
                   duration of this crisis.
    Deanna Troi:   Mooooother!!
  
    [sound of laugh track..]

The Starfleet Academy idea was originally supposed to be the movie Star
Trek V.  Harve Bennett, the producer of Trek II, III and IV  (the trilogy)
realized  Shatner, Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley, were getting too old to
continue making moviesmuch longer.  So the idea was going to be to
reintroduce Kirk, Spock and McCoy in flashbacks to their starfleet academy
years as their young selves, showing how they met (Kirk befriending the
outcast Spock, the victim of racism being the only alien at the academy at
that time)  The idea was that the younger actors playing the old familiar
characters could take them over for future movies.  

Bennet's idea was shot down by Gene Roddenberry, who correctly felt that
the actors Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley were too closely identified with the
roles to accept anyone else playing them on the big screen. They made Star
Trek V instead without Bennet producing, but with the old actors
(debateable as whether that was a good idea since "Final Frontier" is
considered one of the worst Trek movies)

What happened of course is that Bennett quit as the producer of the movies
to concentrate on doing the Starfleet Academy idea as a tv series.  The TV
series got completely reworked on the drawing board when they couldnt find
the right young actors to play kirk and spock, and ended up as Star Trek:
The Next Generation instead.

So its not a new idea but an old one, and there have been plenty of Trek
flashback novelizations that have done well.  

I was pointed to a Web page about a possible "Star Trek: Excellent" series.
The Excellent would be a new, big, yada yada, Star Fleet ship in a somewhat
remote part of the galaxy (6 months travel time from Earth) which was already
mentioned somewhere, but was too stable for any plot.  Then [new bad guys
appear | things get weird | something] and the only real force in the area
is the newly arrived Excellent.

The Excellent? thats a stupidname for a ship? why not use the U.S.s.
Excalibur? that ship must be still in spacedock somewhere.

How about "spam trek: richard" for a long-winded series?  ;-)

The U.S.S. Excellent?  Sounds like a ship captained by Wayne and Garth.

>I think they should have let the Dominion or the Borg or some such take
>over the Federation, Star Fleet and Earth.  Then do a series focused on
>a small number of assorted rebels fighting to break the new
>evil-guys-in-charge Federation.

If you like that kind of dark idea, I suggest you seek out the old BBC 
series "Blakes 7."  In Trek terms, it can be described something like 
this: the Klingons have taken over the Federation and try to frame Kirk. 
[Didn't that actually happen in one of those lame movies?] Our heroes 
steal the Enterprise, half-heartedly intending to be freedom fighters.  
Then Kirk disappears, and Spock slowly starts to crack under the strain 
of command ...

Re racism at Starfleet Academy:  I seem to remember that another ship,
presumably of the Enterprise class, had a predominately Vulcan crew.
How/where did that crew get sufficient training and experience, if not
at the Academy?  (But then, why would the similarity between Vulcan and
Romulan have caused such dis-ease at the first meeting, if Vulcans were
so thoroughly integrated.  "A foolish consistency" perhaps?)

In the early Trek, ISTR, the Federation didn't know what the Romulans looked
like at first.

That would have been the Intrepid, which perished in the "Amoeba" 
episode (TOS).

They could make a new Star Trek series, with a whole new ship and a whole new
crew without to much trouble.  They actually have a viable enemy alien species
out there they could be fighting  (remember the little buggy things that sent
the message back home?) out in the remote reaches of the federation.  Don't
have to worry about make up since they seem to like inhabiting various aliens
bodies.  They are not as powerful as the Borg or the Hiver spicies in the
delta quadrant, and they are remote enough that resupply from starfleet would
be a chancy and sometimes thing.

Unfortunately, we are not writing the shows.  sigh.

wow, I just saw this item again.  I'm happy I can say #0 which I posted 
two years ago saying reports there would never be another star trek movie
were false!  Patrick Stewart and co. are in fact set to start filming the
10th movie in the Star Trek film canon in October.  And the new Stark Trek
Series, Enterprise, starring Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap as the new
captain, premiers soon.  Star Trek lives!

Would "Stark Trek" be a new Donald Westlake project?  :)
 
((Probably someone should start an item for the new Enterprise series.))

When will the new movie be out?

My vague memory/guess is that they would be aiming for Thanksgiving 2002.

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