What happened to the Next Genration Actors’ movies? WQhy were they canned so quickly? (By star trek standards of course, the original series got to be in movies for 35 years).
Seems like baldy and beardy got the boot too early for me to let this one go.
Each movie made less money than the one before. By the time of Star Trek: Nemesis, the film made only a bit more than its production costs. Paramount saw the trend (it was the first Trek film not to debut at #1, losing to Maid in Manhattan, of all things), and pulled the plug.
First Contact was one of the most successful Star Trek movies. Insurrection didn’t do as good, but it was still #1 and made money. I think when Nemesis was made, Brent Spiner and Patrick Stewart said it would be their last Star Trek movie. Since the movies were focused on Picard and Data, I guess Paramount thought that would be the end of the TNG movies. I think the tagline was something like “A Generation comes to an end” or something. When Nemesis bombed, that sealed the deal.
I’d still watch another movie from that era though. Star Trek: Titan with Riker, Troi, and some more old and new characters. Tuvok, a Trill, Wesley Crusher… I kid!
Plus, none of them were very good. First Contact is the best of the bunch and even that isn’t saying much. Generations was boring, Insurrection was just dumb, and Nemesis needed more character interaction and less boring battle.
Sure, TMP wasn’t very good, but from The Wrath of Khan to The Voyage Home is a reasonably good trilogy, there was no Star Trek V, and The Undiscovered Country is, in my opinion, second in the list after Wrath of Khan.
Besides, four movies off a television show is still pretty good.
Plus a sizable part of the reason for the existence of TOS movies was that a large part of the Star Trek fan base arose from people who saw it in syndication long after the original series had ended. Hence the ten year lag between the end of TOS and the first film, eventually there was enough interest to bring it back, but since the show had long since ended, the big screen seemed like a decent bet.
This wasn’t really true for TNG, the series ran its course and was then replaced by a pair of spin-offs for people who still wanted to watch stuff in the ST universe. The reason for the TNG movies was more or less inertia from TOS films.
First Contact is my favorite Star Trek movie, with The Undiscovered Country being second. I liked Generations, I just didn’t like the Nexus. Insurrection should have been a Dominion War movie. Nemesis was just dark from about a quarter of the way into the movie. It had my favorite space battle of all of the movies though.
I think there was also a bit with the original cast being more than willing to cash in on their long suffering through all those conventions and in some cases, rather limited careers and do as many movies as possible, where most of the NG cast weren’t quite so interested. As said, the NG movies tended to be about Picard and Data, and those actors weren’t interested in doing more. Imagine if Shatner and Nimoy had said “yeah, that’s enough” after ST-III. That would have been the end of the line.
Now we’ve got the reboot, which will probably be good for about two more movies, each about 3 years apart, by which time they’ll probably be ready to give a new TV series a go.
Before the first Star Trek motion picture, an attempt was made to bring TOS back to television. The Star Trek movies only came about because of the failure of a proposed Paramount television network (Paramount Television Services). One of their proposed series was to be a continuation of the original series called Star Trek Phase II. It was supposed to take the crew on a second five-year mission, and the sets and costumes were to be identical to those from the original series. All of the original cast, save Nimoy, were expected to return. Several new characters, such as Willard Decker and Ilia, who both eventually appeared in ST:TMP, were also introduced. Sets were built, test footage was made, and thirteen scripts were written before PTS was abandoned in 1977. With the success of motion pictures like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, however, Paramount envisioned success for a theatrical Star Trek film. The script for the ST: Phase II pilot, “In Thy Image” was rewritten into the script for ST:TMP.
There’s a pretty recent video of Frakes and Sirtis talking about pitching a comedy version of a Star Trek series about their time on the Titan. They are joking through most of it, but they are both still up to date on Star Trek and they still interacted great with each other. They mentioned the Titan several times. Hope for a future series?
Why wasn’t data’s actor more interested; what else is he going to do? Shakespeare? This is his gravy train.
He didn’t think an android should get old and fat.
How much money is enough? I’m sure Brent Spiner is set for life and then some. I can totally understand wanting to go into semi-retirement and pick and choose his roles.
And, by the way, he appeared in Much Ado About Nothing at the los Angeles Shakespeare Center earlier this year.
Just because an actor ends up in a part spouting frequently silly dialogue doesn’t mean they aren’t a “real” actor.
-Joe
The TNG cast all appeared on Family Guy a while back, as themselves, not their characters. Stewie took them to McDonalds.
Another new character would have been “Xom” - a pure-bred Vulcan (no human taint) with no emotional capacity whatsoever, but who is intrigued by the idea of emotions. Ilia, as originally written for the show, would have been a being of complete emotional being - one with empathic abilities and who would have related to every person she came in contact with (man, woman or alien) in a sexual manner. When reading the descriptions for these characters, it’s quite obvious that TNG characters Data & Troi were re-worked versions of them.
Anyway, IMO the “Next Generation” films suffered a lot from franchise overkill. When TOS movies were being cranked out in the mid-80s, there was no new “Trek” series taking place, and the original series wasn’t re-ran that often. When TNG films were released, there were three overlapping new series and perpetual reruns of TNG, as well as CD-Roms, video games, etc. Massive over-exposure, especially given the increasing mediocrity of it all, turned off a lot of long-time fans such as myself.
Frankly, I never watched a single episode of “Enterprise” based mostly on the fact that I felt “Trek” had already been milked to death by then.