Free Blog of the Week: What *Is* the Future of 'Star Trek'?
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another free blog of the week!
I promised this week's newsletter wouldn't be full of Star Wars thoughts after my Zero Company theme week, but I didn't say anything about not having any Star Trek thoughts this week. After all, it was the 60th anniversary!
Not that you'd really notice. Unsurprisingly, after San Diego Comic-Con came and went with zero news about the franchise, Paramount marked Star Trek Day proper with comms silence (outside of a collaboration with Le Crueset), a stark contrast to how the celebrations have been used in years prior to tease the future of what was coming with Trek. It truly does feel like it's the end of this era of the franchise at this point—and like it's a while before we get that John Francis Daley/Jonathan Goldstein movie, leaving Trek in another dark age after Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy wrap up next year.
That is a sad thing to feel as someone who's been a fan of the franchise for practically most of my life at this point. Trek was a staple of my childhood, even when Enterprise went off air, and Trek became a defining element of my time at io9, when I took over recaps and effectively covered the rise and conclusion of three shows and a godawful movie in the last 10 years (and covered a good chunk of two more shows).
It will feel odd after next year for Star Trek to become a thing discussed in past tense rather than present for a while. That's a feeling I tried to channel into this week's free blog below, in my more general thoughts about where Trek is at right now and where it could go—a future I really want it to have, in spite of everything going on with it at the minute. Enjoy, live long, and prosper.
Tomorrow, Star Trek turns 60. It should be a joyous celebration of endurance for one of the most iconic sci-fi franchises around, but instead we've spent much of this anniversary year already feeling more akin to dancing on a half-filled grave.
The currently airing penultimate season of Strange New Worlds is in its final stretches, having delivered a divisive season up to this point that has kept both Star Trek storytelling and even those titular strange new worlds at arm's length in favor of increasingly charmless gimmick themes. Besides a truncated final season of SNW that will have to contend with both transitioning the series to the time of the original Trek and with winning back the critical acclaim of its early years, the only other, and currently final, piece of Star Trek on TV still to come is the sophomore season of Starfleet Academy. But even that is cast under shadow, with the looming specter of Paramount's attempts to consume Warner Bros. whole and a coordinated right-wing culture war flashpoint already having brought the series to an early and abrupt cancellation.
As the final gasps of Trek's streaming resurgence get literally sold off for parts, the franchise's purported future at the box office doesn't look particularly rosy either. The theatrical side of Star Trek spent much of that aforementioned streaming resurgence dormant, with a legion of announced movie projects—from a long-awaited continuation of the 2009 reboot universe to wild collaborations with the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Noah Hawley—all left in limbo to be quietly scrapped. Even as Paramount touts a renewed future on the big screen with a new project from the duo behind Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, that too has been caught up in the uncertainty of Paramount's merger ambitions and shrouded in uncertainty (Paramount couldn't even get us a sequel to D&D while they were at it, either).