Imagine going to your favorite steak house, you place your order, you're waiting patiently, and then your food comes. Yet, it isn't the delicious piece of beef you ordered, instead, it's the most impressive-looking sushi you could picture. Do you eat it? Not likely, because it's not what you wanted. It's not what you ordered. It's also darn sure not what you expected.
So why do "filmmakers" keep trying to "subvert expectations" by giving fans of established franchises different things than they want? I'm not watching Ozark for a fun sitcom. I'm not watching Community because I want high-tension scares. I'm not watching Bluey because I like cats.
And I'm not watching Star Trek for someone else's interpretation of what they think Star Trek should be. There's a formula, a successful formula, and deviating from it makes very little sense. Especially after the last eight years, where we know what does and doesn't work for the brand.
Yet, people still try to make something that's decidedly not Star Trek and do so intentionally. Star Trek: Section 31's Robert Kazinsky admits that he knows Section 31 is not what the fans want, and he's terrified of the response the film will get because of it, saying to SFX Magazine (via GamesRadar);
"I'm terrified of how it's going to be received because it's not the Trek people want..."
Kazinsky goes on to say that fans just want more of The Next Generation, saying;
"The Trek that people want, the Trek that we all want, is just 1,000 more episodes of [The Next Generation]. Everyone's always furious that they're not getting more TNG, whilst at the same time when TNG came out, everybody hated it."
Which, isn't true. It's not that fans want more of The Next Generation, they want more of the formula that The Original Series created, and that was expanded by The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. It's that type of show, the show type that Strange New Worlds and Prodigy have embraced, that fans want more of.
The fact he doesn't get that shows me he's not really a big Star Trek fan, or he'd understand that what we want is the basic definition of a Star Trek show. We don't want things that are wildly different from what brought us to the fandom, because then it wouldn't be Trek.
Secondly, there's this lie that people keep spouting about The Next Generation being hated while it was airing. A lie that's being perpetuated. Nearly 16% of all Americans watched Star Trek: The Next Generation's premiere episode, 'Encounter at Farpoint'.
Now, the quality wasn't as good as it would be in future seasons but that's just what happens sometimes. Yet, this idea that The Next Generation was hated upon release is a lie. That series embraced the same formula that made The Original Series so popular and because they followed that formula they too found success.
Yet, when you deviate from what fans want, layered stories of conflicting morality for the most part, and you give us shows or films that reject that mentality, yeah, fans are going to have an issue with it. After all, they ordered the steak, not the sushi. Yet, you keep bringing them sushi wondering "Why are they so mad, I made something really great!"
Except, it's not what we want. You'd think the people who make millions of dollars a year trying to figure out audience trends would realize that.