Star Trek: Starfleet Academy the streaming series only has a second season because they made it while the first season was starting. Otherwise the show is officially done…and nothing of value was lost. There is even questions about Alex Kurtzman’s future in the franchise, having produced failure after failure, the rare success occurring with projects he wasn’t part of, like season three of Picard. Kurtzman himself has said that his mission wasn’t to make Star Trek but to use Star Trek to send a message, meaning being part of the Hollywood-approved sociopolitical viewpoint was more important than making a proper continuation of Star Trek, while still proclaiming that he was following Gene Roddenberry’s vision of Star Trek. The same way Frank Miller treated Wil Eisner’s vision when he ruined The Spirit, maybe.
So what do to with the franchise now, even if Kurtzman does leave? Les Moonves gave him a strong contract as he went out the door because he hated Sherri Redstone for remerging Paramount and CBSViacom, weakening his authority as a result, and he hated Star Trek. Maybe he knew Kurtzman was going to ruin the brand, but I only otherwise know him from the Bayverse Transformers movie and Transformers Prime, where he’s only partly responsible for what happened with the Bay movies and was kept in check by everyone else making Prime. There’s been talk that Kurtzman has damaged the brand, and the best solution would be to disavow Kurtzman Trek and put the franchise on hiatus, burying his shows and hoping reruns of the classic shows and movies (the ones not made by JJ Abrams or called The Final Frontier or Nemesis) will find a new audience like they have since the original series hit syndicated reruns.
I think something a bit more proactive on everyone’s part might be the better option, and it’s something Disney was about to do: let the fans fix the brand. Star Trek fan films are something I’ve posted to this site before. The following video by Trek Vault on YouTube goes over what happened to the Star Trek fan film, and from there I’m going to show that it could be used to bring the brand back to its former glory.
On the one hand I don’t blame CBS for wanting to protect their IP. If they don’t defend it then the legal protections could be stripped away and you don’t have to be a corporation to be against that idea. Axanar got them scared due to how much money they were getting in crowdfunding and the level of production quality that makes you wonder where all that extra money goes in official productions. Over at Disney there are those on the outside seeing what they’re producing and wondering how the effects are that bad and all the money going to reshoots and rewrites instead of putting the movies and shows together. Software has become cheap enough that effects that previously couldn’t be pulled off by average people are now available to people making movies in their basement. Not everything. The computer controlled camera is still pricey even with a DIY solution, but computer effects are better than what the original Star Trek and even early Next Generation had available. It does come off as competition for making Star Trek works.
Back when they first dropped their rules on the fan film community I also noted that some of the rules made sense while others didn’t and were intended to hold down fan films from being better than their stuff, and that was when they didn’t have stuff to show off like Discovery. You could make the case that Axanar went too far and you could make a case against it. However, instead of eliminating fan works and alienating the fanbase (which you could make the case Abrams and Kurtzman Treks both did), take a cue from Disney and Tubi: use them to heighten the brand in a way that doesn’t make them competition: it makes them cheap labor. Remember, these people are doing it for free on the side of their real jobs, so you know they don’t need as big a budget. Officially licensing them and sharing the revenue is a smarter option. Then they’re not ripping off your IP…the way Discovery got in trouble for stealing from an indie game while the idea of “The Burn” and it’s aftermath leading to their Starfleet Academy seems quite similar to a rejected animated series pitch. So pot meet kettle.
OpenAI recently announced that for whatever reason they’re closing their Sora AI app. Disney, upset by fans using it to emulate their IP, even ones they don’t do anything with anymore, tried to make a deal where fans could make a work for shared revenue, even getting their shorts on Disney+. Meanwhile, Tubi is working with YouTube and Tiktok creators to host shows on their service while 24/7 ad-supported streaming channels are out there on numerous services with gamers as a whole and some specific gamers as well as Mr Beast and other non-gaming channels having all of their stuff up to watch like regular TV. Going back to Disney, it was the reason they bought Maker Studio, which is why I’m theorizing that they bought Sora because Iger had to do a final acquisition out the door. He’s an addict, you know. Make a similar deal: let us air this on Paramount Plus or even Pluto TV and we’ll share the ad revenue. A quality control check would be required prior to approval and anything rejected would have to air on their own for free without ads. I’m sure there would be creators who love even non-canon semi-official status to share their love of Trek with fans, and if they get money for it to pay for crew and gear that would be even better.
Now there would still have to be rules, but it would be a less strict revision of the current rules. People who worked on the official material would be free to work on these, but actors would need approval to play the same characters. The push would come away from existing characters with new actors (sorry, James Crowley, but maybe you could rework DC Fontana’s script towards a new Constitution Class instead of history taking them from us) and towards original ships. Starship Farragut proved you could tell a show with new characters on an other Constitution class vessel for familiarity while shows like Intrepid, set in the 24th century and about a ship protecting a colony to the objection of the colonists, can make for compelling Trek, and that’s what you want. Farragut even produced an animated show in the style of the old Filmation series complete with an appearance by James Doohan’s son as Scotty and a cameo by Lou Scheimer. (Read the comments to see responses from the creator and one of the other voice actors.) This would allow for more variety and expansion of Trek beyond the USS Enterprise, something Kurtzman was going for outside of Strange New Worlds but actually looking and feeling like Star Trek, complete with the themes and tones that made the Brand big enough to make more shows, movies, comics, video games, and novels for in the first place.
Instead of fighting fans they should be encouraging the next generation of Trek creators and movie/TV/streaming creators in general. Skydance might even find people they’d want to hire for official canon work for this and other series, thus making more creators free of the egos that are killing Hollywood. I’m not saying let the IP go public domain into the wilderness, but by working with the people who love Star Trek enough to make more of it and know how to excite other less creative fans eager to support more Trek and see the universe expanded, this is the best thing Skydance’s Paramount could do. Right now we have longtime fans willing to get Star Trek die or go back to the wilderness instead of watch it further be corrupted into something unrecognizable. We live in a time where we can set and repair a horse’s leg instead of shooting it. To further the analogy, Fan Trek is the cast to heal that leg from the stumbling caused by Kurtzman Trek. At least think about it if you really want to save this Brand for the immediate and far future. Seeing a property that survived the 1960s go extinct in the 2020s on your watch is not a good look for your company.
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