J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot close to inking deal with WarnerMedia
By D. Goodman
J.J. Abrams’s Bad Robot is reportedly close to signing a $500 million deal with WarnerMedia, which means no more Star Trek from the director.
In the current climate of streaming and digital content, it’s a great time to be J.J. Abrams.
As is being reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Abrams and his Bad Robot production company are very close to signing a deal with WarnerMedia for close to $500 million. The director was being aggressively pursued by pretty much a who’s who of the streaming world, including Amazon, Netflix, Sony and Comcast among others.
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The deal will allow Abrams and Bad Robot to create new properties for WarnerMedia across all media, including film, television and streaming.
The thinking is that with WarnerMedia getting ready to introduce a streaming service of their own to compete with Netflix and Disney, signing Bad Robot was a priority and would give them a leg up on the competition. Which, it definitely will.
So what does any of this have to do with Star Trek? Glad you asked.
According to THR, the feature film deal Abrams has with Viacom and Paramount, which runs until 2020, will likely be moved to WarnerMedia. Which means that the odds of seeing Star Trek 4 ever happen just took another big hit.
If Star Trek is ever going to return to the big screen, it will almost certainly at this point involve a total reboot or an entirely new concept for a fourth Kelvin Timeline film from a new production company.
At this point, it isn’t known how any of this would affect Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek project, which Abrams and Bad Robot was involved in.
If anything, Bad Robot signing a deal with WarnerMedia will give Viacom and CBS all the more reason to stop playing around and become one company again. Then the entirety of Star Trek will be in the hands of Alex Kurtzman and you can be sure more feature films will be a certainty.
Next. Writer Jody Houser discusses Star Trek: Year Five. dark
However, it would appear that with the exception of a possible Tarantino film, the Kelvin Timeline is going to become an unintended casualty of Bad Robot signing with WarnerMedia.
This story is still developing. Keep it here on Redshirts Always Die for more on this story as happens.