Post-Merger, Star Trek Is a 'High Priority'

A little bit of good news for Star Trek fans post Paramount/Skydance merger. According to Dana Goldberg "Star Trek is a priority across the company." Goldberg was Skydance's Chief Creative Officer and now co-leader of Paramount studios. Part of the plan is to possibly not treat the movie and TV side as siloed and look at them "holistically" with Goldberg saying "We’re going to make sure those conversations are happening together so that we can do what’s best for [Star Trek] as a whole."

Now what this actually means remains unknown as there have not been enough movies for the separation of film vs TV to be an issue. Its debatable if the "holistic" view has benefitted Marvel. On top of that its directly contradicted by continued plans for Star Trek 4. It remains a possibility using a script from Steve Yockey (Dead Boy Detectives and others) whose work I have enjoyed over the years. The "Star Trek: Origins" (placeholder name) movie is also still in the script writing stage Seth Grahame Smith (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice) writing and Toby Haynes (Andor) directing. 

On the Star Trek TV front, nothing specific was said which this early in the merger process doesn't mean anything good or bad. My take is a bunch of PR business friendly words were said to what amounts to Paramount will continue with this franchise but don't yet have specifics on what that will be.

Part of the press conference was name dropping other franchises like Top Gun and Transformers as possible new movies. Really though there was no specifics and it all could be summed up as Paramount has intellectual property that they plan on taking advantage of by making more movies per year with a wider variety of budgets. On the network front, they are keeping the properties with no current plans to sell and are aiming to treat them more like brands rather than channels with Nickelodeon and BET cited as examples. 

I suspect the new owners are too polite to say the previous owners underutilized and were too cheap to take advantage of  the many successful properties that Paramount owns and they plan on changing that.