9. Focus Groups Will Tell You How To Reboot
Remember when a movie was the work of a team of talented individuals who were brought together by a director with a vision. Not anymore, its all about focus groups and emerging markets. Film studios have realised that movie releases in America will only make you so much money. The big bucks are made overseas, especially in places like Russia and China who are now opening their doors to western movies. It may surprise some but Star Trek never performed well overseas. It has a huge following in the United States, UK and Australia, but in places like South America and Russia; it has always struggled to generate interest. In order to maximise profits, it was important to break those untapped markets, so Paramount set up Focus Groups across the globe to find out what people wanted from a Star Trek movie. Manke no mistake about it, the international market has become more important than the domestic market. The income from ticket sales abroad can eclipse those from American cinemas and in the case of films like John Carter; it can turn a flop into a commercial success. The results from the focus groups came back that it should have more action and less of the stuff that makes Star Trek, Star Trek. They wanted less technobabble, less science, less talk and much more ACTION. They wanted Spock to lose the ears, less talking on the Bridge and no wacky costumes. Taking that as a guide, JJ Abrams & Co. set about transforming Star Trek into a product that would do well internationally. Paramounts head of International distribution Anthony Marcoly said that the information was only used to shape how Star Trek Into Darkness would be marketed in those countries, but it does seem strange and illogical to go to all that effort and then claim the collected data didnt have any effect on the film you are making. Hollywood has always been a business so its not a big shock that Paramount would choose to milk Star Trek as much as they can. Also test audiences have always been used to test reaction to a film before its release; in some cases whole sequences have been re-shot due to a negative test score. But here, Paramount and JJ Abrams took the data and remoulded Star Trek to the point it had very little to do with what made it so popular in the first place, and all to appease non-trekkies and make lots of money overseas.
To make your mark as a successful director, you need movies that make close to a billion dollars under your belt. The only way you are going to do that is by making your film appeal to the international market. It might seem cynical but to make a hit blockbuster, you dont need artistic vision; you need research data collected from questioning anonymous people in a focus group.