Prequels are not popular
There’s a reason prequels never carry the same popularity as the original, that’s because fans already know how the prequels end. The Star Wars prequels failed because the end was obvious (and because of the special effects, terrible writing, awful directing, the need to sell toys….ok so there’s a lot of reasons). The Hobbit films didn’t outgross The Lord of the Rings, and they had inflation on their side.
The Harry Potter prequels have not even touched the social zeitgeist that the Harry Potter books and films did. Now oftentimes they serve as a cash grab and are rushed out the door with no real effort put into them. Other times they want to tap the well one more time. There is a list of films that you can easily see fit those criteria. Movies like Hannibal Rising, Dumb and Dumberer, Exorcist: The Beginning, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the Hobbit trilogy to name a few.
Fans are largely just turned off by prequels. There are always exceptions to the rule, and Enterprise is one of those exceptions. Why though? Because unlike so many other stories that we’ve mentioned before, Enterprise didn’t directly connect to other forms of Star Trek.
Unlike the other franchises which happened well within the lifespan of one another, Enterprise was set at the foundation of it all. The first warp-capable ship going off on its first long-range mission. It’s a big story. The birth of the Federation of Planets, the end of the Vulcan and Andorian conflict. There were so many stories that weren’t explored until Enterpris came along that it served a purpose. It told stories that needed to be told.
The problem comes from the fact that they failed in every way possible to get to those stories. They didn’t let fans know this was a Star Trek show, they told fans at the start of the show that this show wasn’t for them, and then they took years getting to the conflicts most fans wanted to see. Then you slap on a prequel label and all of a sudden people are nonplus.
It’s unfortunate because Enterprise is one of the better Trek series out there in my opinion and deserves a second chance.