Not much to chew on here but the fact that he is optimistic is a good sign for me (I will take any hope I can get).
I will say that everyone I’ve interacted with in the — I’ll call it the new Paramount — understands what Star Trek is in the sense that they don’t want to mess it up. They understand how important it is. This isn’t just a cash cow to them. This isn’t something where they just need to put laser guns and a spaceship together and get it out there. They understand that this is something special, and so they’re working very hard to make sure that what they do next lives up to that.
It’s always the same with you. Here is an interesting – perhaps shocking – fact: People can dislike both the Ellison takeover and the Alex Kurtzman creative era. There’s no sort of contradiction here. I don’t like Kurtzman because the Star Trek he was involved in was mostly trash, in my opinion. That doesn’t mean that I am happy about MAGA infiltration at Paramount, and I assume that it is the same for the other commenter.
I was mod of /r/StarTrek for a decade and I have yet to see a single situation where a vague “bad writing” complaint wasn’t serving as cover for a (let’s just say) less socially acceptable criticism.
If you’re being honest about your feelings then my advice to you is be significantly more concrete with exactly what it is you are criticizing about Kurtzman, or people are going to assume you’re obfuscating your true feelings.
Its almost like the two are related Kurtzman drove it in to the ground due to bad writing and focus on action set pieces vs progressive normalization storytelling. So Ellison had the chance to buy it.
Alex Kurtzman single-handedly drove the entire Paramount corporation into the ground, keeping his job the entire time, personally enabling Skydance to purchase the entire thing for the low price of $8 billion?
This to you is a sensible theory, and not mind-numbingly stupid?
No not directly related but star trek was their biggest draw to their streaming platform and he somehow pissed off both audiences with his poor creative choices. The fact he kept his job is a failure of leadership of thinking special effects equal quality content. So do I think there was an active effort as some kind of Conspiracy. God no that would be stupid but we live in a world of systems and the actions of one party benefit another party even if they are not working together. Even if the motive was not to help.
No matter how much people may want to portray this most recent era as a failure, I don’t think there’s any sort of data that would back that up (but if there is, I’d love to see it). This is from early last year:
Live Long and Prosper: How the long running Star Trek franchise continues to be a moneymaker in the age of streaming
You could sort of, probably make the case that the landscape has changed since then - the fact that there are no live-action series in development would certainly support that, though I don’t think it really proves anything other than that the company is in shambles right now.
But the idea that the franchise has somehow been killed in the streaming era? It’s essentially fantasy.