Entertainment
See Star Trek Tearing The Bridge Down: NuTrek Is Officially Dead
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
Since the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery in 2017, the so-called NuTrek era of the franchise has been controversial. Some enthusiastic fans have really loved how these shows have subverted expectations and given us characters and stories unlike any we have seen before. Other fans felt this was a major flaw and that these new series should be more like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. Now, though, it looks like the haters have won in a big way because the NuTrek era is officially dead.
Recently, it was reported that the sets for Starfleet Academy are currently being demolished. This is to be expected, of course, as this show was recently canceled. The more interesting fact is that the sets for Strange New Worlds are also being demolished, which means we are deeply unlikely to get the proposed Star Trek: Year One show or any other spinoffs of SNW. Coupled with the fact that no new shows are in development (for the first time in a decade) and that Alex Kurtzman’s contract expires this year, all signs point to the NuTrek era quietly coming to an end.
Why The Sets Being Torn Down Is So Significant
If you’re skeptical that NuTrek is dead, you might be wondering what is so significant about the destruction of these sets. Tearing down the Enterprise set from Strange New Worlds, for example, could theoretically be an opportunity to design new sets more in line with the aesthetics of, say, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. But Paramount is loath to casually make such aesthetic changes for the simple fact that these sets are insanely expensive.
That’s why the network has reused so many sets over the years in order to save money. Much of The Next Generation set (like the engineering section) was modified for Star Trek VI: The Motion Picture. Before that, the bridge from the TOS movies was transformed into the battle bridge for TNG (among other sets). Heck, even the Defiant bridge from Deep Space Nine became the interior of the Delta Flyer in Voyager. These examples (one of dozens) prove that Paramount wouldn’t just demolish sets they thought they might re-use. Arguably, then, tearing down everything from Starfleet Academy and Strange New Worlds implies that they intend to rebuild Star Trek from the ground up.
Worst. Anniversary. Ever
These sets being torn down is bad enough. But even before that, Star Trek fans learned the bleak news that, for the first time in a decade, there are no new shows in development. To make matters worse, this news hit right when the franchise was celebrating its 60th anniversary. In a perfect world, this would be a year of constant celebration for everyone’s favorite sci-fi IP. Instead, with the absence of new shows in development, it feels more like a funeral.
Some fans, however, see it as a good thing that Star Trek will have some downtime so that new creators can make something more successful. While the NuTrek era has been filled with spinoffs, they haven’t exactly been hits: Discovery, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, and Starfleet Academy were all canceled before their time and well before any of them could hit the seven-season mark of shows like TNG and DS9. Paramount wouldn’t cancel shows that were making money, so it’s reasonable to assume these series were financial failures.
After a year (or a few years) of downtime, Star Trek could have an amazing comeback, especially if they keep one man far, far away: Alex Kurtzman.
Shoot His Contract Out Of The Airlock
For better or for worse, Alex Kurtzman has been the chief architect of all things Star Trek since he signed a five-year deal with Paramount in 2018. In 2021, they expanded the deal, but his contract expires in 2026. It’s possible that the network could expand Kurtzman’s contract, but not likely: not only have all of his Star Trek series been failures, but Starfleet Academy (which he was the showrunner of) has been a highly public, highly embarrassing failure. At this point, it’s clear that keeping Kurtzman in charge will do nothing more than run this franchise into the ground.
Paramount simply can’t afford to do that: Trek is one of their biggest IPs, and they’re going to need all the success they can get after the expensive acquisition of Warner Bros. Unless you’re a Kurtzman superfan (they can’t all be bots, can they?), the destruction of the SFA and SNW sets is very good news. The end of the NuTrek era is also the end of the Kurtzman era, which means a new creator will take the reins. If the network can snag someone talented and passionate like Terry Matalas, fans could have something we haven’t had in decades: consistently good Star Trek shows.
Entertainment
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Entertainment
Star Trek’s First Broadcast Episode Was Very Carefully Chosen, Because It Was Boring
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
These days, Star Trek is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But during the development of The Original Series, there was anxiety that the general public wouldn’t really understand Gene Roddenberry’s mashing up Western tropes with a sci-fi setting. Making matters worse was that the original pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC for being too brainy. Fortunately, Roddenberry got a chance to shoot another pilot, one which impressed the network enough to order an entire season worth of episodes.
Several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series had already been shot when the time came for this new show to make its broadcast premiere. The first episode that the general public saw was “The Man Trap,” which featured a shapeshifting monster that was revealed to be an alien salt vampire. This good-but-not-great episode was an odd choice, and it was one that the cast and crew hated. As it turns out, though, this episode was very carefully selected by executives because it served as an inoffensive, relatively straightforward encapsulation of everything Star Trek had to offer.
It’s A Trap!
Most of the information we have about why “The Man Trap” was selected as Star Trek’s first episode comes from the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Within this impressive reference tome, Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow revealed something surprising: NBC had several other episodes to choose from for the premiere, including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “Mudd’s Women,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Naked Time.” All of them had already been shot and were mostly finished, so it was just a matter of figuring out which episode would serve as the best introduction to Star Trek, a heretofore unknown sci-fi series.
“The Man Trap” won out, mostly because the powers that be worried that other episodes would be off-putting to general audiences in some very specific ways. For example, they worried that audiences would find “Charlie X” a story that was “too gentle” because it focused on an adolescent with special powers. This was probably the right call, in retrospect: when Variety gave a negative review of “The Man Trap” (an episode chosen, in part, because of its relative maturity), they declared that Star Trek: The Original Series was “better suited to the Saturday morning kidvid bloc” (ouch!).
A Monster Hit Of An Episode
“The Corbomite Maneuver” was a great potential choice, but this episode’s impressive special effects were still in post-production, and almost all of its action took place on the ship. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” really outlined the premise of the new show, but it was deemed “expository” for general audiences expecting more action and danger. Justman thought “The Naked Time” was a killer introduction to the crew’s personalities, but the network passed, presumably because of how over-the-top (half-naked, swashbuckling Sulu? Oh, my!) that episode gets. “Mudd’s Women,” meanwhile, was deemed too offensive because the plot involved literally selling women to miners.
Through this process of elimination, executives decided that “The Man Trap” was the best intro to Star Trek. It had cool scenes on both the Enterprise and a distant outpost (a strange new world) and featured a straightforward action plot you didn’t have to be a sci-fi aficionado to understand. Finally, it was all about finding and defeating a creepy monster, which offered thrills to audiences of all ages. The network’s choice paid off, and Star Trek: The Original Series became the most popular sci-fi show in television history, even though the cast (including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) thought “The Man Trap” was the worst possible episode they could have chosen.
All of this is a keen reminder of how much thought and work went into putting Star Trek’s best foot forward. It might be a reminder that Paramount’s current upper leadership needs, as Starfleet Academy hit the ground running with the worst episodes of Season 1. The show got better after that, but it didn’t matter because the prospective audience had already been driven away. As it turns out, today’s execs need to learn something that the network execs of the ‘60s had learned very well: series succeed when you give the audience what they want to see and not what you want to show!
Entertainment
How A Fantasy Box Office Bomb Lost $200 Million In Theaters, And Suddenly Became A Streaming Hit
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For the last decade as streaming has taken off in homes around the world, it’s become possible for films that lost historical amounts of money in theaters to find success, even if it might be the post-Mystery Science Theater 3000 trend of “so bad it’s good.” That’s why a massive flop, for example say, Morbius, and films that slightly missed the mark like The Fall Guy can turn it around and become a streaming success.
What’s even more impressive is the amazing turnaround of 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer, which lost Legendary Pictures an alleged $200 million, only to end up topping streaming charts in 2025.
The Classic Fairy Tale With A Twist
Everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the classic fairy tale about selling a horse for magic beans and climbing a beanstalk to find a giant living in the clouds. It’s simple, contains multiple morals, and can be easily adjusted to turn Jack into the villain, but Jack the Giant Slayer instead asks, “What if there was no moral, and instead of one giant, there was an entire army of evil giants?” The movie is the classic story, as you’ve never seen it before, and it almost works.
Nicholas Hoult plays Jack, the young man who finds himself trading his horse to a monk in exchange for beans that he can’t allow to get wet, ever. Like the rules in Gremlins, it’s not long before Jack accidentally gets the beans wet and a beanstalk grows under his house with the princess, Isabell (Eleanor Tomlinson), trapped inside as it grows into the sky. All the king’s men gather to rescue the princess, including Lord Roderick (Stanley Tucci), who, thankfully, Jack the Giant Slayer makes obvious is very evil, very quickly.
It’s up to Jack, Isabell, and the loyal Knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor) to save the kingdom and stop the invasion of giants led by Roderick and the giant two-headed General Fallon (Bill Nighy). If there’s one thing Jack the Giant Slayer does better than every other adaptation, it’s the third act featuring a full-blown war between humans and giants, with a touch of humor and absurdity. Watching a giant toss a windmill like the glaive from Krull is the perfect amount of off-beat to distract from a surprising amount of body horror in both the giant’s designs and Fallon’s ultimate fate.
A Movie For No One
Jack the Giant Slayer looks too good, and the star-studded cast is having way too much fun for it to be a truly bad movie. The problem is that the pacing is off: it takes a little too long to get to the good stuff, then it feels a little too rushed, and though it is a fun adventure, it’s also, like the source material, simplistic. It’s not like the movie wasn’t watched in theaters; it made $197 million worldwide, which would be a great haul except it cost $185 million to make, and that’s not including the extensive marketing campaign.
The push and pull of director Bryan Singer’s vision of a dark take on the fable, complete with actual people-eating on screen, and the sanitized version that hit theaters, which was still too dark for children, since the film is surprisingly rated PG-13, meant it ended up being a film for no one. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings, of 52 percent from critics and 55 percent from the audience, are proof that the final product is not great, but not bad; it’s a movie that will keep you watching for a few hours and then leave no lasting impression. These days, Lionsgate and Sony wish they’d release a movie that is that well-received, as even Jack the Giant Slayer looks like a masterpiece compared to Borderlands or Kraven the Hunter.
Streaming is the perfect home for Jack the Giant Slayer, and 10 years later, it no longer matters that the movie lost hundreds of millions in theaters. It finally gets to stand on its own as a fun, if unremarkable, fantasy adventure.
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