3 reasons why a 4th Star Trek film may never happen

Movie theaters shutting down

With the news that Regal Cinema is shutting down, potentially for good, the focus on modern film making won’t be for movie theaters anymore, but for streaming platforms. Since streaming platforms are largely a money sucker, films won’t be given the same budget most of the time. That means more budget-based series-to-film adaptations will become more and more common. If a studio can’t make back its money and then some, they won’t invest huge gobs of cash into making a film anymore.

Why would Paramount greenlight a $200 million Star Trek film when the streaming service is on has less than eight million subscribers? For the sake of argument, sure, you’ll make close to a billion dollars if you have eight million people subscribed for twelve months; if they’re all paying the $9.99 tier. Yet, streaming services cost a lot of money to keep going. Then you have to realize near billion dollars will have to be made to work for not just Star Trek but for every other series, you have on your service. If you greenlight one Star Trek film, that just cost you nearly 30% of your expected earnings

Then you have three Star Trek shows that cost about $8.5 million an episode. That and the film is 45% of your earnings right there. That doesn’t factor any other original programming for the service, advertisement, the animated Star Trek series, or the price that it costs per month to operate the streaming service. If you think a streaming service is going to throw 50% of its yearly income at one property, you’re sorely mistaken.

That’s if ViacomCBS had eight million subscribers for All Access. Which it doesn’t. So you can’t justify the huge price for Star Trek films without having theaters in placet to distribute them. If you can’t distribute the films via theater, is there even a point in doing a big-budget film? If you can’t do a big-budget Star Trek film, what’s the point in doing a Trek film in the first place?