A year after the Star Trek reboot, Pocket Books was set to publish a series of novels set in the rebooted Star Trek universe. Release dates and authors were posted on Amazon, but as the date grew closer those titles vanished and haven’t been heard from since.
If you were left wondering what happened to them and why the Trek reboot has only been delved into in two movies and some tie-in comics, you can blame the business side of things. According to a long article in TheWrap, director J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot production company initially had big plans for the reboot of Star Trek. According to an inside source, Abrams and Bad Robot wanted to phase out tie-in merchandise based on classic Trek and replace it an ambitious multi-media reboot of the Trek universe that would have included television, digital entertainment and books.
Why didn’t it happen?
A dispute over the rights to Star Trek. The rights to Star Trek are owned by both Paramount and CBS Consumer Products. CBS owns the rights to the original episodes, the characters and the universe while Paramount owns the movie rights. In order to make a new movie, Paramount has to license the rights to the characters from CBS.
CBS also held onto the ability to create future Star Trek TV shows.
Abrams and Bad Robot wanted to phase out tie-in merchandise with the classic Trek cast and create lines with the rebooted crew. CBS continued to manufacture merchandise with the classic Trek characters and research found it was creating “brand confusion” among consumers.
“J.J. just threw up his hands,” a source tells TheWrap. “The message was, ‘Why set up all this when we’ll just be competing against ourselves?’ The studio wanted to please Bad Robot, but it was allowing CBS to say yay or nay when it came to what was happening with the Star Trek products.”
CBS and Bad Robot have worked together on a limited scale — there is an upcoming Trek tie-in game set in the rebooted universe.
But it looks like it could have been a lot more ambitious in nature had all three parties been able to agree.
So what it’s saying, is that they cancelled a bunch of books set in the alternate universe, because books were still being made based on the original universe. Seriously!?! Couldn’t they compromise? I’m pretty sure every Trekkie on the planet would prefer merchandise based on both franchises than just one.
What’s kinda scary is that it sounds like JJ wanted to retconn the original series out of existence, and since Paramount/CBS is still making several metric buttloads of cash from TOS, there’s no way they were going to let that happen unless his reboot pulled in more money than Titanic and Avatar combined.
Wait, does this mean JJ is channeling too much George Lucas, in wanting to undo everything that came before so he can rewrite everything his way? JJ, sweetheart, put down that Star Wars koolaid and slowly back away…
I don’t see why you can’t have both the reboot and classic Trek out there….let the consumer decide which one they want to support.
He should change his company name to “Bad Reboot!” See what I did there? I mad a. . . I’ve never had such mixed feelings for a Producer/Director. Love his original stuff, hate what he did to Trek.
I used to buy the Star Trek books pretty frequently, but I’ve tapered off since the reboot movies because sooner or later I want to read some reboot books.
I don’t mind or care whether pre-reboot books still come out, but I do mind having nothing but pre-reboot books to choose from. The two sides have yitned me into a non-customer.
BTW, “yitned” is Reman for “turned.”