"It hasn't had this epiphany and turned the corner. It's not a happy ship, the good ship Voyager. If I had not gone there, I think I would have always wondered, 'Maybe I should have gone. Maybe it would have worked out. Maybe I would have been involved in the new series. Maybe that was a missed opportunity.' Now I know that none of that is true, that I didn't miss out on any opportunities. It wasn't going to be fun."
—Ron Moore on leaving Star Trek: Voyager
Star Trek proves that boldly going where no one has gone before can be just as problematic as actual spaceflight at times.
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TV Shows
- Star Trek: The Original Series was rife with problems. The root cause for much of it was the network wanting an action-oriented Space Western and the production team wanting to do serious science fiction. Low budgets were also a big problem, something you'd probably figure out from watching almost any episode. Things got especially bad in the infamous Third (or "Turd") Season. The show was renewed thanks to a fan letter-writing campaign, but with budgets slashed further and a move to the Friday Night Death Slot. This led to Gene Roddenberry quitting his job as Show Runner. As a result of all this, the third season had a marked decline in quality with an accompanied increase in campiness. Leonard Nimoy found himself frequently clashing with writers and directors who wanted Spock to do Out of Character things like use violence or hit on the Girl of the Week. By the end of that season, the show had predictably crashed and burned itself into Cancellation.
- If there's any single episode of TOS that suffered from this trope, it was "The Alternative Factor" during the first season. John Drew Barrymore, son of John and father of Drew, had been cast as Lazarus, the main guest role... and then didn't show up on the first day of filming. His agent and lawyer couldn't find him, so they cast someone else in a big hurry (Barrymore's absence led to him getting suspended by SAG for six months after Desilu filed a grievance). The beard for the replacement was improvised from what had been designed for Barrymore, and it shows. The script has howler lines like "Starfleet has been getting reports from all over the galaxy and far beyond..." It also had a subplot in which Lazarus became romantically involved with a black member of the crew — which admittedly seems out of place on the eve of universal Armageddon and didn't have much to do with anything. That was actually filmed... and hastily edited out when NBC got paranoid about how the Southern affiliates would react, resulting in the finished episode's choppy feel.
- "The City on the Edge of Forever" may be a contender for the high point of the entire Star Trek franchise, but it had a troubled time getting there:
- Harlan Ellison's first draft was agreed to be a masterpiece in its own right, but didn't really feel like a Star Trek episode, with Gene Roddenberry's chief complaint being the inclusion of a drug-dealing character who helps get the plot of the episode underway, along with Kirk having him executed via firing squad in the episode's climax. On top of that, Ellison added in an element of barely-suppressed Fantastic Racism between Kirk and Spock, even though Kirk making bigoted remarks had served as an instant Out-of-Character Alert in "What Are Little Girls Made of?" earlier in that season.
- Even if Ellison's first draft was deemed suitably Star Trek, it would not have been possible to film within the budget, according to the production team. This was also a matter of dispute.
- The job of rewriting Ellison's script was given to script editor Steven W. Carabatsos, only for the resulting script to turn out so awful that it nearly resulted in Ellison quitting the project in fury, and played a major part in Carabatsos being let go from the series and replaced by D. C. Fontana shortly afterwards. Ellison then went back and did another rewrite himself, with input from producer Gene L. Coon, and despite deleting the racial elements and changing the drug dealer's demise to a Karmic Death inflicted by the Guardian of Forever, Roddenberry still wasn't happy with it.
- At this point, Fontana herself took a shot at the script, starting over using Ellison's basic story outline as a springboard. This time, everyone involved agreed that Fontana had absolutely nailed the story, with only a few small rewrites subsequently being done by Roddenberry and Coon, mostly to account for actor, set and prop availability.
- Filming was comparatively more smooth, though the demands of the shoot meant they needed an extra two days to film everything. Production designer Matt Jefferies was also laid low with a flu virus in pre-production, resulting in his supervisor, Rolland M. Brooks having to design the Guardian of Forever.
- Before the episode was broadcast, Roddenberry publicly badmouthed Ellison's work on the episode, which infuriated the writer and caused him to demand that he be credited under his pseudonym, "Cordwainer Bird." Since it was already widely known even in 1967 that he used this to flag works which had been wrecked by Executive Meddling, and that this would cause viewers to expect the episode to suck even before watching it, Roddenberry used every means he could to drag out the Writer's Guild arbitration process until the episode was ready to air, and it was too late to do anything more about it. However, this also meant that Fontana, who should have been credited as co-writer, ended up having to go without credit.
- Yet the quality of the original script (while not suitable for a Star Trek episode) and the quality of the filmed episode saw both of them win major awards. The original script won a Writers Guild Award, and the episode won a Hugo Award. As the credited writer, Ellison was awarded both, and used that to further the feud.
- The effects for the show itself also proved no end of production issues with the crew:
- The main company hired to do the series, The Howard Anderson Company, managed to do both pilots on a decent time scale. But when it came to the first actual episode produced ("The Corbomite Maneuver"), their workload increased to the point where there was no choice but to hire other vendors to help out with the show.
- One of these, effects veteran Linwood Dunn's company Film Effects of Hollywood, would go on to produce most of the effects during the first and second seasonsnote . By the time Season 2 started, Dunn and the studio were clearly not getting along with each other (The company worked on the series on an episodic basis), resulting in sub-par effects given to the supervisors and editorsnote . The company left the series by the time of Season 3 due to budget cuts, but their involvement left a sour taste in everyone's mouths.
- The 11-foot model of the Enterprise was, in fact, one of the reasons why Dunn's company was hired to begin with. As the ship proved too huge for both of Anderson's studios for crew to work with. Once Film Effects was dropped from the series, the model and its 3-foot counterpart were subsequently retired, with heavy use of Stock Footage being used for the ship for the third season.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation had a rough ride for its first couple of seasons, which were chronicled in the documentary Chaos on the Bridge.
- Gene Roddenberry's declining health, substance abuse, and paranoia about studio meddling led to his lawyer, Leonard Maizlish, taking control of the writing staff for most of the first season. Maizlish was hated by the show's staff and Paramount executives alike, who describe him as an boorish Amoral Attorney who regularly antagonized the show's staff. By the end of his reign all of the Original Series veterans were gone, who didn't hesitate to name Maizlish and by extension Roddenberry as the reason they left. Near the end of the first season there were rumors that he was breaking into the writer's room to rewrite scripts in flagrant violation of WGA rules.
- Early pains with the cast, namely Patrick Stewart and Denise Crosby. Stewart wasn't convinced the show would last long and had trouble settling in as his Serious Business approach to acting clashed against other cast members, at one point storming off the set to his hotel room after seeing them goofing off between takes. Crosby quickly got frustrated as her character, chief of security Natasha Yar, was given little to do as everyone got cold feet about regularly putting a woman in danger. The producers didn't put up a fight when she decided to leavenote and her character was Killed Off for Real late in the first season.
- The prototype uniforms smelled bad (spandex retains bodily oils more than the newer cloth uniforms) and gave the actors back problems because the costumes were deliberately created one size too small to give them a tight, sleek appearance which strained the actors' bodies. Patrick Stewart states he was told at one point by his chiropractor: "They need to redesign your costume or you need to quit." The rest of the cast was very grateful when they were changed.
- Paramount Stage 16 was used as a "swing set" where any non-permanent sets would be constructed for the needs of any particular episode. Because of the quick turnaround time needed for set construction (which couldn't begin for one episode until the previous episode had completed filming), and the poor environmental controls which could make the stage unbearably hot in the summer and unbearably cold in the winter, the cast and crew affectionately dubbed it "Planet Hell".
- Even by the standards of the first two seasons, the infamous episode "Code of Honor" stands out. One of the two original writers took his name off it after it was heavily rewritten by Roddenberry, and that was before the director they hired chose to populate the aliens of the week entirely with African-American guest actors, whom he proceeded to treat like garbage. Eventually Roddenberry decided enough was enough and canned the director, leaving the first assistant director to pick up the pieces for the remainder of the shoot... which just happened to include the episode's big action sequence. Most of the main cast members (Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner and Wil Wheaton especially) had some choice words to say about the episode in the years after its airing. Many of the writers also felt Roddenberry's rewrite put it beyond any chance of salvation.
- Things got a bit better for the second season where Maurice Hurley took over the writing staff, but since a lot of TV writers chose to sit out the whole 1988-89 season after the 1988 WGA strike, it left no more than about four or five writers working on the show at any one point. It didn't help that, according to Tracy Torme at least, Hurley didn't get along with anybody as he lacked experience in the genre (having worked in crime shows like The Equalizer and Miami Vice) and was as dogmatic as Maizlish in enforcing Roddenberry's will, though he too clashed with Roddenberry after Roddenberry turned in a script that broke his own guidelines. Producer Rick Berman also cited Hurley for temporarily driving Gates McFadden out of the show during the second season as he "had a bone to pick with her."
- It wasn't until the third season, when Roddenberry's health wouldn't allow him to even work, that Rick Berman and Michael Piller gently stole control of the production and the show started to balance out, although even then there were a few bumps along the way, including Piller managing to provoke the entire writing staff he inherited from Hurley into quitting after circulating an insensitively-worded "tips on writing for TV" memo, and Roddenberry still occasionally vetoing story ideas and throwing in bizarre suggestions.
- The seventh and final season of the show would see production troubles return, albeit not to anywhere near the extent as in the first two seasons. The main issue was that the writers were simply running out of ideas, forcing them to rely increasingly on implausible and technobabble-laden plots. This was compounded by new showrunner Jeri Taylor putting a stop to the show's open-submission policy, as she felt the writers were wasting time trying to knock amateur scripts into acceptable shape and that it'd be better to have all the scripts written by experienced professionals from the very start, but this ended up cutting off the flow of new ideas at the worst possible time. On top of that, Taylor also demanded an increased focus on stories prominently featuring Troi and Dr. Crusher, who she felt had been under-utilized in previous seasons, but the writers struggled to actually do this seeing how the most obvious plot routes (the Unresolved Sexual Tension between Troi and Riker, and Crusher and Picard) had been banned by executive producer Rick Berman, eventually causing the writers to resort to the Crack Pairing of Troi and Worf, something that came virtually out of nowhere and was never referenced again after the show ended. The eventual announcement that it would be the show's final season actually helped things out, as they were able to bring back several recurring characters and give closure to their story arcs, ending with a hugely acclaimed series finale, "All Good Things...".
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had probably the least problematic production history out of the 1966-2005 Star Trek shows, though there were a few speedbumps along the way, most notably in the seventh and final season:
- The first was a result of Terry Farrell, who played Jadzia Dax, quitting the series after a dispute with executive producer Rick Berman, resulting in Jadzia getting a bridge dropped on her in the sixth season finale. Reportedly, Berman told the show's writers that Farrell was bluffing and would eventually acquiesce, so they wrote the finale so that it could be altered to have Jadzia just knocked out instead of killed, only for this to blow up in everyone's face when Farrell actually did quit, leaving them no time to rewrite the episode (and as the kicker, Farrell was so sore about the way she'd been treated that she forbade the show from using any Stock Footage or images of Jadzia at any point in the seventh season, leaving a glaring absence from the flashbacks in the series finale). She was replaced by Nicole de Boer, playing the new part of Ezri Dax; the producers tried to distinguish her from the extremely competent Action Girl Jadzia by making her more nervous and incompetent, but this backfired and resulted in a widely negative response to the character, forcing the later spin-off novels to retool Ezri to make her more like Jadzia had been.
- The second major issue came when they ended up massively over-spending on the visual effects for the destruction of the USS Defiant in "The Changing Face of Evil", leaving them with only about two or three episodes' worth of effects budget for the final six episodes (and the finale was a two-parter). This limited them to largely using Stock Footage for effects shots in the rest of the season, and notably hurt the third-last story, "Extreme Measures", by forcing them to ditch the surreal dreamworld originally planned in favor of just re-using the regular DS9 and Defiant sets with no alteration.
- The first six episodes of Season 6 were also a doozy. Designed as a very tight story arc involving the Dominion taking over the station and ultimately being expelled by the returning heroes, it quickly became clear that the crew were completely out of their depth in creating such an intensive long-term story. The various episode crews were constantly over- or underestimating how much time and resources they would need, and eventually the B-plots of two episodes had to be completely switched so the first could be done on time, requiring some significant rewrites to keep the continuity making sense. Remarkably, this all turned out very well and the arc is generally regarded as one of the best parts of the show.
- Just getting Star Trek: Voyager to air was incredibly problematic. Originally, Geneviève Bujold was to play Captain Janeway, but had no experience with a television schedule. Reportedly, there were also creative differences: Bujold had a habit of ad-libbing emotions and differing from the director's and producers' vision of the character. According to Rick Berman, no one on set believed she would last a week, but she had been brought in by the studio as a 'name' actor for the role. On the second day of shooting, Bujold walked off the set and did not return. (Making at least one crew member in the betting pool extremely happy).
This caused a chain reaction of problems: The crew filmed what they could while trying to recast Janeway, but, being Star Trek, they sort of needed to have The Captain be prominent in the first episode. This led to production shutting down for two weeks. When they finally got Kate Mulgrew for the role, after viewing the rushes, they noted that the stage lighting didn't mix with Mulgrew's ginger hair, creating a blinding distraction in every shot. This prompted more reshoots (with a severe "bun" hairstyle on Mulgrew), most of them on-location, which were no longer available and thus more expensive. A favorite joke on set was wondering if the pilot would be finished before the series ended. Adjusted for inflation, Voyager's pilot cost more than Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.- But it was all worth it just to bring smiles to the fans' faces? Right? Actually, the debut of a female Captain provoked bomb threats
.- Even earlier, when the show was in the conceptualization phase, the scuttlebutt on the convention circuit was that Voyager was intended to be the first show to feature a female captain, but that this might not happen due to resistance among staff higher-ups. Fans who wanted to see Star Trek's first major female captain were encouraged to write letters to the main opponent of the idea...showrunner Jeri Taylor. A woman.
- In the writer's room, there was apparently a lot of friction over the direction of the series — some of the writers wanted to follow a more serialized pattern, others wanted an episodic approach. As everyone now knows, the latter prevailed: The first season introduced several story arcs that were either aborted or left untouched. The first attempt at a multi-episode character arc, in Season 2, with Tom Paris' erratic behavior and the traitor, was wrapped up in a manner most found unsatisfactory.
- Even the fundamental premise was contentious. While it was always decided that Voyager would take place in the unexplored Delta Quadrant, and much of the series' tension would derive from the crew being decades away from any kind of oversight or assistance, the nature of this was changed around. Early pre-release material established Voyager as a short-range vessel, sort of Starfleet's answer to a PT Boat, meant to launch from a starbase, be out for a few weeks or a month or two, then come back. As a result, she would not be equipped with spacious rec decks, large-scale science labs, or even advanced sensors. A faction of the staff decided playing on the drama of a short-range ship stranded decades from home wasn't interesting, and they won out, and Voyager was retconned into a "long-range science vessel" to explain the lack of issues with regular maintenance and resupply... and leading viewers to wonder why a science vessel was out hunting Maquis raiders, didn't seem to have much in the way of science facilities and staff aboard, and was as heavily-armed as a Galaxy-class, despite being a fraction of the size. Elements of the earlier idea are still present in early scripts, such as Janeway noting they have plenty of photon torpedoes, but no way to replace them.
- Much of the drama was intended to come from the mingling of the Maquis and Starfleet's crew. This was all but completely dropped partway through season one, and only sparsely brought up afterwards, apparently because the "no interpersonal conflict" rule Roddenberry had handed down for Next Gen was still in effect. Mind you, Voyager still had plenty of interpersonal conflict, it just didn't stem from the Starfleet/Maquis divide. Early episodes are clearly laying the seeds for greater issues with the Maquis crewmembers, and the implication that sooner or later, Janeway will have to do something Starfleet probably wouldn't approve of to resolve the situation. Instead, the Maquis suddenly become happy little Starfleeters and the conflict is barely referenced again.
- When Deep Space Nine concluded, Ronald D. Moore joined the writing staff on Voyager. He left after an episode and a half due to the atmosphere in the writer's room, where he specifically was told, when asked how to write a character, "we don't know, do whatever." This led to a falling out between him and former frequent writing partner (and head of writing staff) Brannon Braga, who was no longer in any mood for collaboration. Braga essentially drummed Moore out of the job by refusing to let him attend meetings, even relocating the script conferences to his own house. In recent years, they appear to have patched things up.
- Robert Beltran, who had agreed to play Chakotay just to act alongside Bujold, was not a happy camper for the seven-year run. Not long into the show's run, he stopped playing nice and openly expressed his loathing of the show's plot, his co-stars, the producers, himself for playing such a formulaic (and at times borderline racist)note role, and the fans for watching it (causing some disillusioned Trekkies to flee a convention in tears). His co-stars fired back in separate interviews, and the showrunners publicly told him to muzzle it. There were even rumors that he attempted to force his exit from the show by demanding an outrageous amount of money during contract renegotiations, only to have it given to him without complaint. Years later, Beltran claimed on Reddit that the public took his "flippant" comments too seriously and that his overall experience with the show was positive.
- According to one account, Jennifer Lien's departure from the show was a mix of tumultuous circumstances. During production of the "Scorpion" two-parter at the end of the third season, it was decided to bring on a new cast member. The producers didn't want to make the main cast go any higher than nine members, and were considering cutting Harry Kim's actor, Garrett Wang (supposedly because he was known to be lazy and missed filming for several episodes). However, Garrett's inclusion in a People magazine article (as one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in The World") in 1997 caused the producers to scramble to find someone else to fire, and the axe fell on Lien. Reportedly, she didn't even know she had been fired until she read the script for "The Gift", her farewell episode.
- On top of that, according to Bryan Fuller, "The Gift" had been meant to be episode five of the season, having allowed an arc to build to Kes's departure. Instead, it's packed into a single episode.
- Many years later, this story has been strongly implied to be a cover for what actually happened: Lien's well-publicized mental health struggles actually began during her time on Voyager, proving increasingly disruptive to the show's production. Attempts at intervention were unsuccessful and the decision was made to write Lien off from the show. Wang, on the other hand, was never under any serious risk of being fired; sure, his character was gravely injured in the season 3 finale, but Harry Kim was well-established as the show's Butt-Monkey, a proud Trek tradition in general (see Chekov, Riker, and O'Brien on earlier shows). The real reason for Lien being let go was kept secret to protect her reputation and career (similarly to Michael O'Hare over on Babylon 5), which is why the producers never offered an explanation as to why she was let go, other than that Kes was too similar to the incoming Seven of Nine (which she was, because Seven was created to replace Kes). Lien's lone reappearance as Kes, in season 6's "Fury", involves the character having lost her mind, a very uncomfortable Reality Subtext. Many in the cast and crew were extremely sympathetic to Lien's circumstances and resented her being cast out by producers, which only created more problems during the production of season 4.
- You may recall how an additional cast member and second pilot revitalized Deep Space Nine. Well, lightning managed to strike twice, but Seven of Nine's arrival only aggravated the preexisting tensions in the cast. In spite of Paramount's frantic efforts to paper over the cracks, there were reports of an unnamed co-star making life difficult for Jeri Ryan. The cast member in question was widely suspected to be Mulgrew, and it became something of an Open Secret in Trekdom. After two decades of fixed smiles and refutations of 'tabloid gossip', everyone involved with the show dropped the mask and confirmed the rumor was true. Mulgrew was ticked off about a number of executive decisions—the firing of Lien, Jeri Taylor's habitual lateness in delivering scripts, and the writers shifting focus away from the Captain (nominally the show's star and spokesperson when dealing with the press) and toward the voluptuous Seven—and it's a wonder she didn't pop a blood vessel from frustration. Berman, in one of his rare inspired decisions, took advantage of the animus developing between his performers to pair Janeway/Seven up as much as possible, creating a memorable double act. In later years, Mulgrew has admitted the Seven character probably saved Voyager from cancellation, but that she resented sacrificing time with her family for a television series Janeway no longer starred in. Wang, who shares more in common with his character than he lets on, compared the Mulgrew/Ryan feud to his "mother and sister fighting", and says he was reduced to tears on more than one occasion. In fact, just talking about the experience makes him weep even today. He has even done his best to "broker peace" between the two actresses at convention halls—and he seems to have succeeded.Ryan: Before every close-up, the hair and makeup and wardrobe teams come in and do touch-ups and everything to make sure everything's right. They shut the door to the set, and said, "She's fine. LET'S GO." Wouldn't let them in. Just stupid, stupid stuff like that.
- And none of this factors into the issues with Ryan's Future Spandex costume. Alongside being uncomfortable and delicate, it was downright dangerous, with the high collar pressing against Ryan's carotid artery and causing her to faint on set at least twice, alongside creating a production shutdown any time she needed to go to the bathroom (causing her to simply not drink and suffer from dehydration).
- A particular favourite of Wang's stories to tell at conventions: the series finale's final shot was to end on a shot of Kim crying Manly Tears of joy at the crew's arrival home, with it starting as him having a touched smile, to full on tears. This shot did end up being in the show...in a different context altogether. The shot was shortened to Kim weeping at the birth of another character's baby. Wang was extremely pissed at this, and phoned up CBS in a fit of rage to ask why it was used in hard context.
- Wang himself was a punching bag for many of the producers. A whole list of reasons would end up as long as this page itself. It's a miracle he is able to go from con to con and tell stories about the experience with a sense of humour.
- Wang had a couple of flare-ups with executive producer Rick Berman. When he asked the latter why he wasn't promoted higher than his character's standard rank, Berman replied, "Well, someone's got to be the ensign." Wang has also gone on record as stating that an early interview with a reporter caused Berman to deny him the chance to direct an episode purely out of spite.note
- But he's not entirely blameless. Reportedly, during the first two seasons, he so frequently came in late and hungover from his weekends in Vegas that he was put on notice, and even though he did clean up his act was discreetly punished by being largely written out of a few episodes.
- But it was all worth it just to bring smiles to the fans' faces? Right? Actually, the debut of a female Captain provoked bomb threats
- Star Trek: Enterprise: Rick Berman had been campaigning for a break in televised Star Trek as far back as Voyager, but Paramount was adamant on having a new series following the end of Voyager. Brannon Braga looked to get some fresh blood into the franchise by getting a new writing staff, but discovered they were not up to the task of handling an hour-long television show like Star Trek. Braga was forced to rewrite almost every episode of the first two seasons, a fact he is not proud of. Being a network show meant they had a lot more studio micromanagement, and efforts to make a newer, fresh series were forced back into the Star Trek cliche. Things got a little bit better near the end of the second season when Braga was given the go-ahead to shake things up, and the third season brought in another writing staff, including Manny Coto, who became the showrunner for the fourth season.
- While the actual production of Star Trek: Discovery has apparently been problem-free, at the executive level there has been considerable turmoil:
- CBS's major idea was to use Discovery to entice viewers to sign up for the CBS All Access app. To do this they sold the overseas distribution rights to Netflix, in return getting a price so high it practically paid for the entire production cost. However, this meant that in the US, after the first part of the pilot aired on broadcast, anyone wanting to watch the series had to subscribe to CBS All Access, alienating and angering many viewersnote who didn't want to pay $6 a month for the privilege of watching Discovery and, for them, nothing else they weren't getting anywhere else.
- Unsurprisingly, within weeks, new subscriptions to All Access weren't anywhere near CBS's targets. Netflix, feeling it had been had, told CBS that they would be greatly reducing their offer for the overseas rights for the next season.
- The original showrunners had envisioned the show relying entirely on its own characters, needing little reference to the original series beyond Sarek. CBS, panicking, fired them after six episodes, replacing them with Alex Kurtzman, whose success with the rebooted Hawaii Five-0 had made the network trust his ability to revive an old show. Shortly afterwards, Rainn Wilson was written into the show as a younger Harry Mudd.
- Kurtzman then lost the show's biggest supporter in the executive suite when CBS president Leslie Moonves was forced to step down following serious sexual misconduct allegations. Viacom did not have much luck selling the overseas rights for the second season outside Canada, so it made a series of 20-minute shorts focusing on an individual character from the show (including one who hadn't yet otherwise been introduced) as a way of stirring interest from those buyers.
- The show gained a major name in the writers' room in Season 3 with Walter Mosley, only for him to quit after just a few weeks saying the show had a much too hostile work environment. This included an incident where he told the other writers a story about being pulled over by a racist cop who called him a racial slur... only to get reported to HR for saying said slur, despite being part-African-American himself.
- In early 2023, in the midst of an industry-wide contraction in original programming on streaming services, Paramount+ abruptly announced that the show's fifth season would be its last, with the airing delayed until 2024 to give everyone involved the time to create a proper finale. Although a benevolent gesture, the cancellation was itself, by all appearances, a complete shock to the showrunners, who might have plotted the rest of the season differently if they had known going in that it would be the last (contrast the team behind Picard, who knew that the third season would be its last before production even started).
- Star Trek: Picard has apparently hit several snags at one point or another:
- Proposed ship and uniform designs were reportedly sent back to the drawing board after licensees objected to their appearance, as they were evolutions of designs seen on Discovery instead of TNG and its film spin-offs, and thus weren't likely to appeal to the franchise's traditional demographic. This resulted in construction of the costumes and sets falling behind schedule, which in turn threatened to push back the production's planned start date of April 2019.
- The writing room for the first season also had to deal with major turmoil, mostly on account of the fact that there wasn't actually a designated showrunner — purportedly it was supposed to be Kirsten Beyer, but she was dealing with personal issues that prevented her properly taking up the role — until about the halfway point of the season, when Michael Chabon took on the role.
- The second season had the COVID-19 Pandemic to deal with. In addition to the usual social distancing measures that had to be carried out on-set, the pandemic apparently delayed things enough that new showrunner Terry Matalas was only able to write the first half of the season before moving into writing the third season, leaving Akiva Goldsman and Michael Chabon to finish up the second season.
Animated Shows
- Star Trek: The Animated Series had troubles mostly in the pre-production phase, as the producers initially only intended to bring back William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan and Majel Barrett, creating Suspiciously Similar Substitutes Arex and M'Ress for Sulu and Uhura respectively. However, the lead cast members put their foot down and refused to do the series unless George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig were brought back. There wasn't the budget to bring back all three, however, resulting in them having to agree to a compromise measure whereby Takei and Nichols would return as regular cast members, and Koenig would be allowed to write an episode of the series (Arex and M'Ress were retained, albeit with the former replacing Chekov rather than Sulu). However...
- The episode that Koenig wrote, "The Infinite Vulcan", was completely rewritten from top to bottom by Gene Roddenberry, ending up with nothing in common with Koenig's original script other than that it involved a giant clone of Spock, and plant people (the latter of which wasn't actually Koenig's idea in the first place, but rather Roddenberry's). Koenig fumed, but consoled himself with the thought that he'd at least be allowed to come back and voice the story's Big Bad — only to find out at a Star Trek convention that he wasn't even going to be allowed to do that, something that doubly irritated him when he later found out that not only did the show feature other, non-regular Star Trek actors (namely Mark Lenard, Stanley Adams, and Roger C. Carmel) in guest roles, but other guest actors (including Ted Knight, Ed Bishop, and Jane Webb) who had never appeared in TOS.
- Another episode that suffered from heavy meddling by Roddenberry was the second season story "Bem". David Gerrold had first pitched it for the third season of TOS, but then-producer Fred Freiberger didn't like the story, and also didn't think it could be produced on a diminished third season budget. Gerrold instead submitted it for TAS, and Roddenberry bought it, but then told Gerrold he couldn't have two of his scripts put into production since it would create the appearance of favoritism. Gerrold understandably decided to have "More Tribbles, More Troubles" produced instead, as it was a sequel to a highly popular TOS episode... only for Roddenberry to then have two scripts by another former TOS writer, Margaret Armen, put into production. It was eventually made for the second season, but not until after Roddenberry had demanded the inclusion of a Sufficiently Advanced Alien antagonist, though Gerrold did at least turn this requirement to his advantage by demanding that Nichelle Nichols voice the resulting character, as she almost never got to voice anyone except for Uhura.
- Star Trek: Lower Decks in general has enjoyed a trouble-free production, though during production of Season 2 it had to work through some issues caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic, which left many guest stars unable to come into the studio to record their voiceover work, forcing them to record temporary voice tracks at home with whatever equipment they had to hand just so that the animators had some kind of reference to work with. Most of the voice cast were eventually able to record replacement tracks, but a few of the guest stars were either unable or unwilling to come into the studio, leaving the season with some sound quality issues in certain places. The show's otherwise clockwork-reliable production schedule was naturally disrupted by the lengthy WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023, as the actors were not able to record their lines before the WGA went on strike in May, and only completed their voice work after the SAG-AFTRA strike ended in November, putting them half a year behind schedule. (It is unclear if all scripts were completed prior to the WGA strike commencing.)
Films
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Paramount, trying to cash in on the success of Star Wars, decided to convert a proposed Star Trek Sequel Series into a movie (mostly because the new Paramount TV network it was supposed to be anchoring got canned six months before the launch by Gulf & Western head Charles Bluhdorn, who feared the network being a major money-loser; in his defense, the last major attempt at a fourth network before then, 1967's Overmeyer/United Network, hadn't lasted long). Unfortunately, this left them in the unenviable position of assigning Gene Roddenberry as producer, because of the godlike cult of personality he'd built up among Trekkies/ers, despite the fact that he'd only produced one feature film beforenote . Their concern was justified.
- Even when it was still supposed to have been the pilot episode for the series, Roddenberry and his cowriter, Harold Livingston, had been feuding. His replacement, Dennis Clark (Comes A Horseman) got along even worse with the Great Bird, and Livingston was back in three months. But despite Livingston having it in his new contract that Roddenberry couldn't do any more work on it than he already had, Roddenberry would do rewrites on the sly and then send them to the studio head.
- Paramount's original budget was $8 million. The original director and producer were let go once Roddenberry realized that just the special effects alone that audiences would be expecting after Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind would cost that much, and possibly more. Robert Wise was hired as director and the film's budget doubled. He put shooting on hold while he had the sets and (yes) the costumes redesigned. But the cast, already under contract for the now-abandoned series, was still getting paid every week under regularly extended contracts, and finally Paramount said in late summer 1978 that principal photography had to start.
- Nimoy, at the start of the whole project, was hell-bent against returning to Star Trek thanks to being caught up in his own feud with Roddenberry over not receiving merchandise royalties. While his character was going to be replaced with a Suspiciously Similar Substitute, Paramount realized they could not really make the movie without Nimoy, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, then a Paramount executive, flew to New York to beg Nimoy to return. Nimoy settled his lawsuit within a few days and was recast as Spock, but was still on really bad terms with Roddenberry.
- Wise didn't want to shoot for more than 12 hours a day, saying he "lost his edge" after that. That might have been OK if he made efficient use of the time he was shooting. But on the first day, more than a thousand feet of film was shot, only for most of it to be thrown out. Only slightly over a page of script was deemed to be in the can. After only two days of filming the production was behind schedule for good.
- Grace Lee Whitney (reprising her role as Janice Rand from the first season of the series) recounted in her autobiography that, following a practical joke on Wise that she took part in, Wise forbade the makeup department from providing its services to her. She noted that this is why it often takes a while for viewers to recognize the transporter chief as Rand.
- The feuding between Roddenberry and Livingston continued, at the expense of the script. William Shatner, who titled his chapter on this in Movie Memories "Star Trek: The Emotional Picture", said the cast was getting revisions every two hours. And they hadn't even settled the question of what was going to happen in the third act, until two months had gone by and Leonard Nimoy began mediating between Roddenberry and Livingston at night after shooting.
- Another delay was caused by the sets, particularly those of the Enterprise. While most of them had been built for the TV series, they were now set to be struck after the movie. Therefore it became essential to make as much use of them as possiblenote . The script had to be written and rewritten around this ... and then there were the production problems. They had been built with the idea they would be lit for TV, and thus the movie crew had to spend hours more than otherwise expected figuring out how to light them for film. They also created problems like a lot of uniform belt buckles getting smashed against the bridge railing, and the transporter floor getting so hot that crewmembers' rubber-soled shoes were actually melting if they spent too much time on it when it was lit up from within.
- Only after the wrap did Wise check on the special effects, of which he hadn't even seen a demo shot (which concerned him). It soon became apparent that the first special effects house, Robert Abel and Associates, couldn't get the job donenote . Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey) and his former assistant John Dykstra (a founding member of Industrial Light & Magic) had been the original choices, and as their previous commitments had since either been completed, as was the case with Trumbull, or booted them from production as was with Dykstra (!!) they were brought onboard with only months to go. They had to work around the clock to get the job done. By now the film was so over-budget that Paramount executives were keeping a running tab each day of how much it was such. It was said that the reason the finished film relies so much on the effects was that someone at Paramount decided they had to show where all the money went.
- According to Wise and Jon Povill, the associate producer, the released film was a rough cut that no one had seen in its entirety before shipping. Wise completed the final cut a day before the premiere and had to take it with him to Washington. The reels were still wet when they were loaded onto the projector. While the film ultimately proved a box office success despite some claims that it wasn't, critics were lukewarm toward the film's overall sluggishness and lack of character. The experience left much of the cast drained, nearly derailed Katzenberg's Hollywood career (he survived to get to Disney), and Shatner feared the film would be a Franchise Killer.
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan wasn't nearly as troubled as the first film, but it had its problems:
- Despite everything that had happened on the first film, Paramount were willing to let Gene Roddenberry produce a sequel on condition that it be produced for only around half the budget, that Roddenberry share the producer's job with Jon Povill, and that Paramount would have approval on the storyline and choice of screenwriter. Roddenberry responded by rejecting all their demands except for their proposed budget and told them that he would write a sequel based on an idea he'd had involving Kirk and Spock getting involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and that Paramount could either take it or leave it. They opted to leave it, kicked Roddenberry upstairs, and replaced him with veteran TV producer Harve Bennett.
- Bennett had expected a budget of around $20 million to make the film with, but when meeting the Paramount executives, happened to quip that he could make four movies for the money that had been spent on the first film. The executives responded by saying "thanks!", and sent Bennett on his way with a small even at the time $11 million budget; still enough to make a film with, but it forced savings to be found throughout the production.
- Writing was the hardest part of the process. Bennett chose to make a sequel to the classic episode "Space Seed", with initial writer Jack B. Sowards producing several screenplays that were decent, but somehow lacking. TOS veteran Samuel A. Peeples was then brought on-board to produce a new draft, only for the resulting screenplay to turn out to be complete garbage, not least because Peeples for some bizarre reason deleted Khan from the script and replaced him with two Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. Now in the position where he needed a script in not more two weeks in order to prevent production from falling apart, Bennett was nearly forced to go with the last draft that Sowards had produced and just hope for the best, but newly-hired director Nicholas Meyer volunteered to do the job himself, even foregoing credit to ensure he could get the job done on time. The script also had to be tweaked after it was leaked that Spock would die in the film. The Kobayashi Maru sequence was written in to fix that, showing Spock "dying" in a simulation, so that when he dies for real, it could produce the proper Emotional Torque in the audience.
- Filming and post-production was relatively smooth aside from the cost issues, and Meyer having trouble with William Shatner's Large Ham tendencies even in scenes that called for a more subdued performance, though he was eventually able to find ways to work around it: He'd run multiple takes of a shot so Shatner would get a little tired of the repetition, which would tone down his delivery. However, the film's original ending, in which Spock was presented as being absolutely, unquestionably dead, was considered to be too much of a Downer Ending by test audiences, resulting in Bennett and a small camera crew hastily filming an extra scene showing the torpedo containing Spock's body having soft-landed on the Genesis Planet. It let the film end on a moment of hope, but Meyer was incensed, and refused to come back for the third film.
- Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was largely trouble-free, aside from an initial misunderstanding that caused Paramount to refuse to let Leonard Nimoy direct the film (a condition of his returning as Spock) until Nimoy cleared things up. That is, until the slight matter of the soundstage containing the Genesis Planet set catching fire, causing significant damage to the set and putting filming behind. Fortunately, between the set elements being easily replaceable and Nimoy's efficient directing style, the production quickly recovered and finished on time.
- Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was where things really went wrong for the original cast films. After Nimoy had directed two successful films in the franchise, he suggested that William Shatner ask to direct the next one, since Paramount had an informal agreement with them that anything one got had to be offered to the other eventually, as well.
- Shatner originally wanted to direct a film about Kirk saving his crewmates from hell, but he was met with opposition from the studio (who wanted a lighthearted comedic piece like the last film, as it had done so well), and cast (Nimoy and DeForest Kelley objected to their characters betraying Kirk), leading to rewrites. Gene Roddenberry, who had been shut out of the creative process for the movies since the first one, but was still consulted, was none too happy with Shatner for the eventual plot, which is a loose remake of "The God Thing", the never-filmed script Roddenberry had wanted to film as the pilot of the aborted TV series reboot. He dropped hints for the remaining years of his life that the film was to be considered non-canonical by fans.
- The script took a while to be done, not helped by a writer's strike during pre-production and the studio's concerns about going over budget forcing scenes to be reworked or cut. To top it off, Paramount rushed the film into production in late 1988 despite the writers' strike cutting into pre-production so as not to lose franchise momentum.
- At the beginning of the production, the Teamsters went on strike. The crew had to hire non-union truck drivers and take precautions against sabotage. After one of the camera trucks mysteriously exploded in the parking lot at one location, police escorts were hired for all the truck convoys.
- The scene of Kirk climbing the mountain had to be reshot when it was discovered that a pine tree was in the background, ruining the illusion of height, while a shot of Kirk clinging to the face of El Capitan appeared muddy due to clouds obscuring the sun and ruining the Depth of Field.
- Filming in the Mojave desert resulted in many crewmembers passing out in the 110 °F heat. At one point, Shatner snapped and started berating people. When a driver failed to appear and stranded Shatner and a skeleton crew, a park ranger came to the rescue and the production managed to film scenes of Sybok's followers before they lost daylight.
- The film also met with troubles with the budget and special effects, since Industrial Light & Magic already had their hands full with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Ghostbusters II. So they had to hire Bran Ferren, who worked on the equally awry Altered States, leading to Special Effects Failure in this film as well. Notable was a rock monster envisioned for the climax that was cut for not looking convincing, and the "amorphous blob of light and energy" that replaced it still not pleasing Shatner, with the studio denying funds to reshoot the scenes.
- The film opened well, but quickly faded after a few weeks. It made money, but less than the other films had. It's true that that summer had a very crowded slate of sequels and potential blockbusters...but still. More importantly however, critics eviscerated the film, and this combined with the underwhelming box office proved the death knell for both Shatner's career as a film director, and the career in general of Harve Bennett, who produced and co-wrote all four 1980s Trek films, but whose only subsequent work was on Time Trax. On top of that, Gene Roddenberry instructed the writing staff on Star Trek: The Next Generation that they were to treat the film as non-canon, a directive they were only too happy to follow.
- Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country had troubles mostly left over from the previous film:
- Following the critical drubbing and underwhelming box-office of the previous film, Paramount were only willing to allow $20 million for a sixth film to be produced. Bennett and The Final Frontier screenwriter David Loughery produced a screenplay for a prequel film that would have been set during Kirk, Spock and McCoy's days at Starfleet Academy, only featuring Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley in segments bookending the film. Paramount rejected the story immediately, and Bennett, who had been on extremely thin ice with the Paramount executives as it was, jumped before he could be pushed and quit the series. Nimoy was subsequently installed as the new executive producer and creative lead on the film, with Bennett's right-hand man, Ralph Winter taking over as line producer, and Nimoy's first decision was to re-hire Nicholas Meyer to direct.
- After an initial draft by writers Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal proved unsatisfactory, Meyer wrote a new screenplay with co-writer Denny Martin Flinn. However, Paramount initially refused to budge on their $20 million budget figure... until a personal friend of Meyer's took over as head of Paramount, and added another $10 million to the budget.
- Filming went reasonably smoothly, though some of the cast objected to dialogue showing their characters to be bigots, resulting in Meyer having to switch around some lines, and delete others entirely. Post-production also went quite well, though there were a couple of issues around the soundtrack; Meyer initially planned to forego a conventional score and use Gustav Holst's The Planets suite to score the film, but this was rejected by Paramount, then both Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner proved unavailable, leading to Cliff Eidelman being hired to do the job at a very late stage.
- One last problem reared its head not long before release when, despite the screenplay being really written by Meyer and Flinn based off of Nimoy's story, the Writer's Guild of America awarded the writing credits solely to Konner and Rosenthal. Nimoy was absolutely livid and threatened to sue the WGA, who in turn threatened to have all their writers boycott Paramount unless Nimoy backed down. Cooler heads eventually prevailed, and it was agreed that Nimoy, Konner and Rosenthal would be credited for the story, and Meyer and Flinn for the screenplay.
- Star Trek: Generations might not have been as troublesome as the original cast's first film, but it was certainly a baptism of fire for the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew:
- With TNG showrunners Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor too busy working on running Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and creating Star Trek: Voyager respectively, producer and franchise head honcho Rick Berman commissioned two competing screenplays; one from frequent TNG writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, and one from former TNG showrunner Maurice Hurley. Hurley's screenplay eventually turned out to be unusable, resulting in them being forced to go with the Moore and Braga script.
- Berman handed Moore and Braga a "laundry list" of plot elements they had to use — specifically, that it had to be a cross-over film with Kirk appearing in the TNG era, that the opening had to show the until-then unseen Enterprise-B, that the Duras Sisters had to be involved and operating a Bird-of-Prey (so that they could re-use the Stock Footage of the Big Bad's Bird-of-Prey exploding from the previous film), that Data had to start using the emotion chip that he got in TNG's final season, that the Enterprise-D had to be destroyed in a crash-landing, and that the story had to end with Kirk's death — causing them to struggle to incorporate all his demands into a coherent story. To make things worse, they had to work on TNG's finale, "All Good Things..." at the same time, and with that being the one more urgently required, it got the most attention, hurting the screenplay for Generations.
- When it came to picking a director, Berman initially approached Leonard Nimoy, who was willing to do it. However, negotiations soon broke down when Berman made it clear that Nimoy would not have any creative input. Wanting a director who was more used to just filming the screenplay as written and not trying to over-step what he saw as the director's boundaries, Berman instead hired David Carson, who had recently directed DS9's pilot episode.
- During pre-production and filming, the combination of a director, producer and screenwriters who were all new to theatrical film production resulted in numerous poor budgetary decisions, including spending extortionate amounts of money on sets and costumes that would have only a few minutes of screentime and could not be re-used on DS9 or the upcoming Voyager, leaving the rest of the production short-changed. As a result, when producing the next film they took more care to create props and models that could be re-used on the TV shows.
- They also had new costumes designed, but after the replacements proved unsatisfactory, instead of just re-using the TNG uniforms they for some reason decided to give the crew DS9-style outfits. Unfortunately, they only had the money to give Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner entirely new outfits; Jonathan Frakes and Levar Burton had to make do with Avery Brooks' and Colm Meaney's DS9 outfits respectively (neither of which quite fit right), while Michael Dorn continued to wear his TNG uniform (there were no DS9 uniforms that fit him). Gates McFadden and Marina Sirtis, meanwhile, also wore their TNG uniforms after bluntly refusing to wear wear the DS9 uniforms by arguing that they made Statuesque Stunner Terry Farrell look fat.
- Originally, the opening scene on the Enterprise-B was meant to have Kirk, Spock and McCoy appearing together one last time. However, Nimoy, still smarting at how negotiations for him to direct had gone sour, refused to appear as Spock, while DeForest Kelley was in poor health and didn't like how McCoy had been written, and so also refused to appear, forcing their parts to be hastily replaced with Scotty and Chekov respectively. Some lines, notably Scotty's "Captain, is there something wrong with your chair?" are obviously direct transplants from lines meant for McCoy or, in this case, Spock.
- The ending was what caused the most trouble. At first, the film had a short, abrupt ending in which Kirk and Picard foil the Big Bad, only for Kirk to die from being shot in the back. This got such a terrible reaction from test audiences that Paramount told Berman to go out and completely reshoot the film's ending. What did they come up with? The Trope Namer for "Dropped a Bridge on Him." In a repeat of The Motion Picture, Generations ultimately proved a commercial success, but a critical failure.
- Moore and Braga point out some more obvious signs of the rushed production on the DVD commentary, with Jonathan Frakes blowing a line to say "That's a pretty big margin of error" ("If you just listen to that line, it's wrong! And nobody caught it!") and that they probably could have come up with a less silly way for Picard to get past Soren's force field than crawling through a hole it didn't get to if they'd had more time.
- Star Trek: First Contact only really had trouble early on, due to Rick Berman's demands that it involve popular recurring villains the Borg, while also being a time-travel comedy in the vein of The Voyage Home. Moore and Braga were re-hired as screenwriters, and initially produced an outright comedic screenplay named Star Trek: Renaissance, showing the Borg taking over a castle in renaissance Italy, and the Enterprise crew foiling them with the help of Leonardo da Vinci; this screenplay was regarded as far too silly, and Patrick Stewart killed it altogether by insisting that he wasn't going to wear tights. Moore and Braga's second attempt, Star Trek: Resurrection was nearer the mark, but relegated the Borg to an action sub-plot aboard the Enterprise and focused mostly on Picard's time-travel shenanigans while impersonating the inventor of warp drive, with Picard never even finding out about the Borg's involvement. Finally, the people involved decided to make the film a proper follow-up to the events of the acclaimed "The Best of Both Worlds" two-parter from the series and have Picard confront the Borg head-on, resulting in the film that was released.
- As with Generations, Moore and Braga do some fun complaining on the DVD commentary about the Executive Meddling they had to deal with, this time agonizing over how to present the Borg Queen without creating a Continuity Snarl with "Best of Both Worlds." Moore ends up declaring it was way more effort than the issue deserved, and whoever takes over the franchise next should probably just burn the whole thing to the ground and start their own Alternate Continuity. JJ Abrams would later take this advice.
- Star Trek: Insurrection essentially had the problems of First Contact in reverse:
- Michael Piller, who was hired to write the screenplay, initially wrote an Apocalypse Now-inspired screenplay in which the Enterprise crew are forced to kill Data after he runs amok, then rebel against the Federation. Paramount had been pushing for a Lighter and Softer Star Trek film for some time now, however, and after three entries which dealt with heavy subject matters, finally put their foot down and demanded it this time, with Patrick Stewart supporting their demands.
- Piller therefore rewrote the screenplay, while adding in some of his personal beliefs regarding a preference for "rural simplicity" over technology. However, all the rewrites gutted the screenplay of its original point, with Levar Burton and Marina Sirtis both finding it incredibly boring, and Stewart admitting that he felt the villains were more in the right than the Enterprise crew. Paramount, despite their initial Executive Meddling, actually gave a helpful memo suggesting that they flesh out the villains' motives more, but it was apparently ignored, as was similar advice from DS9 showrunner Ira Steven Behr.
- In an echo of the abortive attempt to have Leonard Nimoy direct Generations, returning director Jonathan Frakes clashed with Rick Berman over the latter's philosophy that the director's job should be little more than to get the story onto the screen as quickly and efficiently as possible. Frakes stuck with the project, but the alienation he felt over his lack of creative inputnote resulted in him not directing for Star Trek again until the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, nearly twenty years later.
- Finally, Berman insisted on having the original ending — which ended with the Big Bad being de-aged out of existence by the Fountain of Youth radiation he was after — refilmed in favor of just having the Big Bad blown up, adding another $10 million to the budget, and meaning its underwhelming box-office response was felt all the more.
- Downplayed, surprisingly enough, by Star Trek: Nemesis. But enough things went wrong to have dire consequences for the franchise:
- For the most part, writing and filming went pretty smoothly. Maybe a little too smoothly, however — Oscar-nominated writer John Logan was given Protection from Editors in his contract, and this had knock-on effects when it came time to choose a director. Nicholas Meyer was the first choice, but he expected to be able to have a crack at the script as he'd always done in the past, and when Berman informed him that Logan had final script approval, Meyer declined. Berman then considered LeVar Burton, wanting to "promote" him like Jonathan Frakes, but Paramount went over his head to install U.S. Marshals director Stuart Baird, as part of an overall deal they had with him in exchange for doing editing work for the studio note .
- By his own admission, Baird was only there for the paycheck. He had no prior experiences with the franchise and held no fondness for it, and so wasn't inclined to ask Logan for rewrites note . Reportedly, Baird mistakenly thought that Geordi was an alien instead of a human with artificial eye implants, and repeatedly mispronounced Levar Burton's name as "Laverne" during filming. Marina Sirtis, while considering the film overall a slight improvement on Insurrection (as did Burton)note , didn't have too many kind words to say about Baird afterwards, and Stewart and Frakes, while liking him personally, later admitted him to be a poor fit for the series.
- It was after production had finished where things started to go wrong; 2002 had arguably the busiest Christmas release schedule of the modern era, with major franchise films such as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Die Another Day, surprise hits such as Maid in Manhattan and The Santa Clause 2, and a whole host of Oscar Bait movies vying for attention. Faced with a murderer's row to contend with, Paramount insisted on cuts that would shorten it enough that theaters could show it more often each day than The Two Towers. This resulted in an estimated 50 minutes of footage being axed from the final film, with Baird cutting most of the character scenes to emphasize the action sequences, creating a number of omissions including the Big Bad's original introductory scene and Wil Wheaton's role being reduced to a non-speaking cameo.
- The film's screenplay was leaked and heavily mocked by fans, and when the trailers hit they confirmed said screenplay had been used without any major revisions which further drove fan expectations downward. When it was released, it got the worst reviews of any film in the series outside of The Final Frontier, being hit with a healthy amount of It's the Same, Now It Sucks! from critics, and also picking up some backlash from the tepid second season of Star Trek: Enterprise (which didn't do much to help the fortunes of Nemesis by airing the widely-despised episode "Precious Cargo" two days before Nemesis opened).
- And Paramount's gambit of cutting Nemesis down to squeeze out more showings failed miserably, turning it into a Box Office Bomb of staggering proportions. Having failed to beat the aforementioned Maid in Manhattan in its opening weekend and contending with The Two Towers in the following weekend, Nemesis experienced the worst second weekend of any major movie release in history until that point, dropping 76% of its intake, before dropping out of the top ten altogether the following week. Foreign territories were equally unkind in box office numbers. The failure of the film helped push Trek into going on hiatus after Enterprise finished its run. Baird would not direct another film and returned to a steady career in editing, and it did significant damage to the careers of Tom Hardynote , Brent Spinernote and long-time Trek producer Rick Bermannote .
- Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness both managed to relaunch the franchise to great success, and had trouble-free productions to boot. Star Trek Beyond, however, was a different story:
- With J. J. Abrams, the director of the first two films, decamping to work on The Force Awakens, and co-writer Alex Kurtzman helping to create Star Trek: Discovery, it was left to Roberto Orci, the other co-writer of the first two films, to handle the third. He was appointed as writer-director and got as far as hiring key production staffers and having initial sets built, before Paramount suddenly ordered him to drop the script he had co-written with J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, and then fired him altogether shortly afterwards. Reports on why this happened vary; some say that Paramount wanted more of a Guardians of the Galaxy-type ensemble comedy piece, while others say that Orci's version of the film was more fan-friendly, but much like Generations, it would have been at the expense of Continuity Lockout for casual audiences. According to a documentary by Midnight's Edge, things were so bad that Orci was marched out of the studio by security, and that his firing was an open secret in Hollywood for months afterwards. Whatever happened, it was bad enough that all of Orci's credits past The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (his last credited collaboration with Kurtzman) have been solely as an executive producer. Justin Lin was eventually hired to replace Orci.
- Simon Pegg and Doug Jung were then hired to write the new version of the screenplay, and nearly quit several times themselves. Pegg later said that the only reason they didn't walk out was because they knew it would mean there'd be no Star Trek production released to mark the franchise's 50th anniversary. Years later, Lin would describe working on the movie as the worst experience of his career — including Fast X, which he actually quit early in shooting.
- Orci's version was planned to have Leonard Nimoy cameo for a third and final time, but by the time Lin, Pegg and Jung took over, it became clear that Nimoy's health simply wouldn't permit this. Nimoy ultimately died in February 2015, and the screenplay was rewritten to specify that The Character Died with Him. Additionally, Anton Yelchin (who played Chekov) died in a freak accident shortly before the film was released.
- According to sources, the film had last-minute (and expensive) reshoots to add Shohreh Aghdashloo to the cast as Commodore Paris, the commanding officer of the USS Yorktown. The reshoots were done in California just four months out from release, while Aghdashloo's scenes provide critical plot information and Book Ends (namely, discussing Kirk's intent to take a Rear Admiral position at the beginning and end of the film).
- In early 2016, the film's initial reveal trailer was met with an overwhelmingly negative reaction for its focus on action over story and character, with even former Trek stars such as Wil Wheaton and George Takei savaging it, and Pegg and Lin publicly disowning the trailer, the reaction to which may well have doomed the film's box-office chances from the start.
- After a solid but unspectacular first two weekends, any chance of Beyond experiencing a good run at the box-office was crushed by an unexpected rival in the form of Suicide Squad (2016), which far surpassed industry expectations and completely buried Beyond, especially in international markets. It was reported years later that the film had actually surpassed Nemesis as the worst financial failure in the franchise's history.
- With J. J. Abrams, the director of the first two films, decamping to work on The Force Awakens, and co-writer Alex Kurtzman helping to create Star Trek: Discovery, it was left to Roberto Orci, the other co-writer of the first two films, to handle the third. He was appointed as writer-director and got as far as hiring key production staffers and having initial sets built, before Paramount suddenly ordered him to drop the script he had co-written with J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, and then fired him altogether shortly afterwards. Reports on why this happened vary; some say that Paramount wanted more of a Guardians of the Galaxy-type ensemble comedy piece, while others say that Orci's version of the film was more fan-friendly, but much like Generations, it would have been at the expense of Continuity Lockout for casual audiences. According to a documentary by Midnight's Edge
- The untitled Star Trek 4 (not to be confused with Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek pitch, which is reported to be a divorced concept) has been mired in problems, with attempts to move production no further ahead at the end of 2023 than when it was first publicly announced in 2016:
- The film was announced four days before Beyond was released, in an attempt to woo investors after internal tracking figures made it clear to both Paramount and Bad Robot that Beyond would be a financial underperformer at best. Reportedly, Bad Robot had a deal in place that guaranteed them a profit, regardless of how well Beyond performed, and were pushing to get a fourth film greenlit. What resulted, however, were investors pulling funds, forcing Paramount to scale back the budget and salaries for the principal cast in order to have a shot at getting the project completed. The film was announced with the entire principal cast seemingly confirmed to reprise their roles.
- In 2018, it was reported that while Paramount were trying to lock down actors, Chris Pinenote and planned co-star Chris Hemsworthnote (reprising his role as Kirk's father from the 2009 film) were refusing to sign on for the derisory salary Paramount were offering. Hemsworth also added in a subsequent interview that he thought the proposed screenplay for the film was terrible. Meanwhile, the rest of the cast were supposedly already very reluctant to do a new movie without Yelchin.
- The film was reported to have been cancelled in January 2019, with planned director S. J. Clarkson leaving the project to helm the pilot of a Game of Thrones prequel tentatively titled Blood and Moon (which was subsequently axed by HBO). Nearly a year later, the film was announced to still be in production, with Noah Hawley (Lucy in the Sky, Fargo) announced to direct the film.
- In mid-2020, a report from Trekmovie.com claimed that Hawley had not yet turned in a script or even a detailed outline for what a proposed fourth film would entail, while several cast members, including Pegg and Zachary Quinto, expressed doubt that a future film would even happen. The Viacom/CBS merger appears to have resulted in Hawley's pitch being jettisoned, according to an interview in November 2020. A number of the Kelvinverse actors, including Pine, have expressed interest in returning for a fourth film, and Paramount's new President, Emma Watts, is said to want to return to the idea of Star Trek as a big-budget tentpole franchise for the studio, which means bringing the Kelvinverse back out of mothballs. However, given the pandemic delaying most of the studio's major releases into 2022, it appears likely that Star Trek won't return to the big screen until 2023 at the earliest, making it the longest delay between films since the 2002-09 interregnum between the Berman and Kelvinverse eras (and tied for the longest ever), which was confirmed by Paramount in April 2021 when they announced that the next film would come out on June 9, 2023.
- It wasn't until July 2021 that a director (Matt Shakman, the director of WandaVision) and writers were officially attached to the project. In November of that year, the film's release was delayed until December 2023, with reporters noting that no further information about the film's plot, setting, or cast of characters had yet been made available. It wasn't until February 2022 when it was finally revealed that the film would indeed revive the Kelvinverse setting, with all surviving cast members returning (including Pine)note , although it was subsequently revealed that this was done without having signed new contracts with said actors, giving them a massive advantage in contract negotiations. Later that month, it was unofficially confirmed that the Tarantino concept had been dropped without ever having been formally greenlit (in an article which went into some detail about what the film would have entailed). This 14-year gap between installments of the Kelvinverse sub-series is longer than the entire span of the TOS films (1979-91, 12 years), which saw the release of six films.
- At the end of August 2022, it was announced that Shakman had departed the project before production had started in order to helm yet another Fantastic Four movie, leaving the film without a director once again with only 16 months to go before the film's scheduled release date. It appears that very little, if any, work was done during the year that Shakman was at the helm, as the film was quietly removed from Paramount's 2023 release schedule in late September, suggesting that the film won't be released until 2024 at the earliest, making it the longest drought in Star Trek film history. Pine corroborated the apparent lack of forward motion in the film's development when, despite screenwriters having been attached for over a year, he claimed in an interview in September 2022 that he had yet to see a script.
- In December of 2022, it was reported that Zoe Saldana would only be willing to return to the series if she's paid as much as her male co-stars. This also occured around the release of Avatar: The Way of Water, which Saldana starred in, which became a quick billion dollar hit, as well as at a time when Saldana can lay claim to having starred in the two highest grossing movies of all time, with more Avatar sequels in the works, giving her much higher negotiating power and much less reason to return to Trek if her demands aren't met.
- In January 2023, Sofia Boutella expressed interest in reprising her role as Jaylah from Beyond. Shakman granted an interview the following month where he lamented his failure to get the sequel off the ground during his year at the helm, but declined to divulge any details about the script they were developing because of his belief that they were still planning on going ahead with it with whomever would be chosen to direct. Abrams confirmed in March that the continuing search for a new director was ongoing, half a year after Shakman's resignation, while also hyping this script as the most compelling since the original reboot film. A magazine feature interview with Pine that same month once again reiterated that he still had yet to see this script, though he diplomatically couched his frustration with this by noting that it was common for actors to be among the last players involved in a film's production to get to see it. Pine also admitted to a growing dread that the project was "cursed".
- One year later, in January 2024, Deadline reported that a prequel film set decades earlier than the 2009 film had been greenlit for development, though it is unclear if this would place the film before the 2233 prologue and, therefore, effectively set it in the "prime" universe. Although the article made pains to point out that the "final chapter" (there having been no previous indication that the fourth outing for the Kelvinverse crew had been planned as their last) was still in "active development", it's telling that there has been absolutely no progress in the search for a new director in the whole of 2023, even while productions were on hiatus as the writers and actors were on strike (but the directors weren't, allowing the search to continue unabated). Bad Robot are behind this new project, and completing it might fulfill any contractual arrangements between them and Paramount in lieu of a Star Trek 4.
- The film was announced four days
