Ok. I read several posts stating how much each made so I did some digging. Here is the list of all TNG movies, cost, gross, and net.

Star Trek: Generations (1994) cost: $35 mil, BOG: $75 mil, net: $40 mil

Star Trek: First Contact (1996) cost: $45 mil, BOG: $92 mil, net: $47 mil

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) cost: $58 mil, BOG: $70 mil, net: $12 mil

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) cost: $60 mil, BOG: $43 mil, net: -$17 mil

TNG movie totals: cost: $198 mil, BOG: 280 mil, net: $82 million

Looking at the progression, it is hard to say that Star Trek wasn't dying. Pleasing hardcore fans doesn't make you a lot of money. Times change, tastes change. Star Trek had a great run in it's time, but a new generation brought different sensibilites. I love Star Trek. I love Star Wars. As many have pointed out, Star Trek was Classical music and Star Wars was Rock n' Roll. Each with it's own set of adhearants. I happen to think both are great. I have about as much Classical music and Scores as I do Rock, Metal, and Industrial.

On to the last installment.

Star Trek (2009) cost: $140 mil, BOG: 257 mil, net: 117mil

All these numbers are US box office polls only. No other nations or video sales. So one movie did bury 4. Hard to fight those facts. As will all metrics though, we have to take it with a grain of salt. Investment to profit ratio is:

4 TNG movies:

Star Trek: Generations (1994) IvP: $1.14

Star Trek: First Contact (1996) IvP: $1.04

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) IvP: $ 0.21

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) IvP: $0

Total IvP: $0.41

Star Trek (2009) IvP: $0.84

So, as you can see, Generations and First Contact did much better than J.J.'s first outing. Had they not done Insurrection and Nemesis they would have a better average (Hell, how they green lit Nemesis is beyond me after Insurrection's showing).

Just for S&G comparisons

Star Trek: the Motion Picture (1979): cost $35 mil, BOG: $39 mil, net: $4 mil IvP: $0.11

So J.J did better than the original TOS movie, but not as good as TNGs first movie. You can theorize about the merits and flaws of such and I'm sure many will. I agree with other posts that Star Trek (2009) has much more Star Wars in it than Star Trek. So all I can say is that I'm excited, with some reservations, about J.J. helming the next trilogy. We shall see.

P.S. I just had to do my favorite ST movie:

Star Trek: the Wrath of Khan (1982): cost $11mil, BOG: $78 mil, net: $67 mil IvP: $6.09

Khan FTW!

Star Trek fans expect logic from Star Trek films. When a film director starts doing things that defy logic simply to get character moments and "epic' shots, he spits on everything that Star Trek is about.

 

Most of you might be fine with a Starship being built on the ground in freaking Iowa. You might be fine with Kirk's dad staying on a ship that he can clearly program to crash without him to save a bunch of escape pods that are being completely ignored by the bad guy anyway. You might be fine with the addition of a water slide to engineering just to keep the action going and give a comedy relief moment. You might be fine with a Korean guy playing a Japanese character. You might be fine with him saying that he took fencing and then whipping out a techno katana and proceeding to fight Kendo style. You might be fine with all of that completely illogical nonsense but real Star Trek fans are not.

 

And that same kind of nonsense will be present in the new Star Wars now.

 

I quoted this for two reasons.

1- Most people don't care about a Korean actor playing a Japanese character. It's acting. Actors act. It's not something I recall anyone ever complaining about in this Star Trek series.

2- Star Wars isn't based on logic at all.

Let's take one of the most fan favorite Star Wars films of them all ... the Empire Strikes Back.

No one seemed to care about how illogical Carbonite Freezing was. No one really seemed to mind the idea that there lived a big huge creature in an Asteroid. That it trapped its prey by pretending to be a cave. In an Asteroid belt that no one in their right mind would fly into to ever become that prey. That it could breathe/exist in the vacuum of space. That a ship could land in its belly, where there were no stomach acids and instead mynochs lived in that stomach. No one questioned the logic of the empire tossing out thousands and thousands of probe droids onto remote planets, even though the logistics and cost of such a mission would have been exorbitant even for Palpatine's empire, or that of those probe droids, they easily found Hoth. No one questioned how the AT-AT's armor was too strong for blasters, yet once tow cables brought one down, a speeder was able to finish it off with ... you guessed it ... blasters.

So if your knock on Abrams is that he eschews science for the action and the story, he's going to pretty much fit right in with the Star Wars movies.

I didn't like the last ST movie because it felt... well silly.

The Kobayashi Maru scene was literaly painfull to watch.

And more than one "humorus" scene was in fact nothing more than slappstick.

I wouldn't have minded so much if they would have treated this movie as a sperate franchiese or as a missstep not to be taken seriously. But no, since the movie was aired I have seen serveral attempts to crowbar the whole mess this movie's story left behind into the canon.

Up to the point that in STO, they retconned the BS about the blast of a supernova reaching a different star system in mere hours instead of years by sugesting that the supernova somehow traveld through subspace.

I wish I just made this up...

So, if the upcomming SW movie fallows the same pattern, then I, as a Star Wars fan, do not look forward to it.

J. J. Abrahms. Enough said?

 

Yeah, he already ruined one sci-fi franchise. Let's give him the other one too.

 

How did he ruin a franchise that was already dead in the water? The last Next Generation movie bombed and the last Trek series was canceled due to poor ratings. If anything, Abrahams revived new interest in the franchise.

Captain Kirk was a guy who constantly disobeyed orders (a dick), endangered his crew because he always ran into old enemies and usually won because the bad guy made a fatal mistake, or because Spock or Scotty bailed him out. That's not a great hero, that's dumb luck. I don't see how your description of the reimagined Kirk is any different than that.

Passion.

With the original Kirk you felt the character wanted to be a starship commander. There was nothing else he desired more and he pushed himself to become one of the greatest in history. No out side stimulus was needed. He had found his best destiny. His love for the federation drove him forward.

New Kirk, had no passion. Nothing drove him but circumstance. By the time he was talked into going to the academy you already had the feeling his life couldn't get any worse. Starfleet was just an option to get him out of his current miserable state. No love for the federation or what it stood for, just another job.

Hear, hear:

I will let also Yoda explain why prequels are just... bad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0Wy8wKyFAs

If you don't agree: don't expect to receive a pizzaroll!

JJ Abrams will bring much needed "realisim" to the screen play for the new Starwars movies, and what ever CGI is used will also look extremely real or well enough done that you get the emersion factor. At least you proabably won't be "thinking" to hard about the total CGI sets that we got in the recent starwars movies. Granted, CGI has come a long way since the recent starwars movies.

Abrams often bangs and hits the camera ($$$$$ cameras) in some scenes by hand to give explosive or wind concursion effects just because machines can't do it properly. All in all he is a gifted director.

All thats left to be seen is... will the movie itself be "allowed" to be as good as it can? Based off what story they want to do. Screen play writting has not been exceptional in the recent starwars movies along with on screen chemistry with some of the actors while others did well

J. J. Abrahms. Enough said?

 

Yeah, he already ruined one sci-fi franchise. Let's give him the other one too.

 

Dude, the star trek remake was better than the orignal, in my opinion. The old version just always bored me, but with the remake J.J. turned that old franchise into a fresh new direction. I actually have really high hopes for what he will do to star wars. EP. VII FTW!!!

Passion.

 

With the original Kirk you felt the character wanted to be a starship commander. There was nothing else he desired more and he pushed himself to become one of the greatest in history. No out side stimulus was needed. He had found his best destiny. His love for the federation drove him forward.

 

New Kirk, had no passion. Nothing drove him but circumstance. By the time he was talked into going to the academy you already had the feeling his life couldn't get any worse. Starfleet was just an option to get him out of his current miserable state. No love for the federation or what it stood for, just another job.

"In my stars I am above thee; but be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em." - Shakespeare

TOS Kirk stood out by pushing the envelope (the only real way to stand out among millions of other junior officers). He cheated at the Kobiashi Maru. He made a mistake that cost the Farragut her Captain and 200 crewmembers. And if you buy into the book series, he was lost his first command of the USS Lydia Sutherland will all hands. Only he and Gary Mitchell made it out alive. So, even the TOS Kirk had his own troubles.

In the new Star Trek, Kirk has none of his overagressive tendancies culled from him as a youth and makes many more mistakes along the way. He is still the TOS Kirk at heart, willing to bluff and take risks. I don't find the new Kirk much different from the TOS Kirk, other than the rapid honing of the edge that will become Captain Kirk. From what I understand of the new movie, he is a much more mature and capable leader that we saw in the first one. So his time in command guides him toward the more traditional Kirk we all know. (BTW, the

So it seems that while the old Kirk achieved greatness, this new Kirk's greatness was forced upon him. In any event, he rose to the challenge.