10 Movie Franchises That Are Probably Doomed
4. Star Trek
Not unlike Star Wars, Star Trek is still an objectively huge media empire whose current focus is on a number of ongoing TV series.
But the cinematic side of the franchise has been in dire straits for almost an entire decade, given that its last big-screen adventure was 2016's Star Trek Beyond.
Beyond came out nine years ago this summer, easily eclipsing the previous six-and-a-half-year gap between Star Trek: Nemesis and J.J. Abrams' 2009 franchise reboot.
A big part of the problem holding up a new Trek movie? Beyond underperformed commercially on a huge budget, and so Paramount has been reluctant to greenlight Star Trek 4 with an inevitably larger price tag, given cast salaries and so on.
Star Chris Pine has himself expressed a desire for a smaller-scale Trek movie that would give it a greater chance of commercial success, and yet, despite numerous filmmakers being associated with various iterations of Trek 4, it still hasn't started filming.
Though Paramount apparently wants to develop Star Trek 4 as a send-off for Pine and the rest of the Abrams-era cast, how many people outside of Trek's hardcore fandom will actually care about this given the ridiculous amount of time that's passed since Beyond?
But what's the alternative? Rebooting the series again and hoping that they can strike casting gold once more? And as the disastrous recent Section 31 streaming movie proved, even films based on the popular current TV shows aren't a sure thing.
Ultimately, it wouldn't be that shocking if Paramount scuttled all their plans for Trek movies and just trained their focus on expanding the TV universe.