10 Years Ago, Star Trek: Beyond Echoed the Franchise’s Struggles to Exist

10 Years Ago, Star Trek: Beyond Echoed the Franchise’s Struggles to Exist

Like being trapped in one of those time loop episodes.

Over in the world of television, Star Trek appears to be at the end of its line. There’s one more season in the can for the current shows, Strange New World and Starfleet Academy, and then... that’s it? Some of the uncertainty has to do with the fact that Trek’s parent company, Paramount, currently exists in a quantum superposition as corporate merger attempts ping-pong back and forth between boardrooms and courts of law, a multibillion-dollar Schrödinger cat just begging for someone to get on with it and collapse the waveform already.

But also, Star Trek is just kind of cursed to this sort of uncertainty. And 10 years ago, the series was in pretty much the same boat. As it had been a decade before that. And a few decades before that.

Star Trek has always lurked right at the periphery between “ubiquitous cultural presence” and “niche nerd fare with no mainstream appeal.” A proverbial city on the edge of forever, as it were. The original 1960s TV series had a tempestuous run that was really only made possible by the largesse and conviction of Lucille Ball, who sank most of her fortune into making Star Trek a reality. She faced an uphill battle against the network, which had zero confidence in a hammy spaceship show where moral parables played out by way of people in extraterrestrial prosthetics. Executives cut its budget and shifted it into worse and worse time slots with each new season until finally strangling it into cancellation... right around the time that man walked on the Moon and science fiction became the hottest, coolest thing in media.

Trek came back a decade later in the form of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which eventually snowballed into a film series that did well enough to inspire a new TV series—Star Trek: The Next Generation—which in turn inspired more shows and more films. But as the show itself said, All Good Things... By the time the fourth Next Generation film (Nemesis) hit theaters in 2002, alongside the broadcast debut of the fourth Trek spin-off series (Enterprise), Trek had begun to look like a spent force... and by the time the Enterprise team found their stride, the changing tastes of the television audience and the struggles of their parent network caused Trek to enter cancellation a second time.

Enter the new movies, an effective reboot of the Star Trek concept that returned to the adventures of James T. Kirk and crew aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. 2009’s Star Trek arrived in theaters with a bang, as Chris Pine portrayed a younger, brasher Kirk and director JJ Abrams treated Trek as an exciting, action-packed concept rather than the slower, more cerebral work depicted in the older films and shows. It was an unquestionable hit, bringing in more box office earnings than any Trek film before it, which meant a sequel happened in short order and made even more money. And then, in 2016, Star Trek: Beyond turned Pine-Kirk’s “Kelvinverse” saga into a trilogy... and ended up being a pretty substantial flop at the box office.

The box office take didn’t reflect actual fan sentiment concerning the movie, which generally positioned it as the best of the trilogy. The Star Trek reboot movies were always kind of a cheat; rather than actually starting from zero, they retold Kirk’s story in an alternate reality caused in part by the arrival of Mr. Spock from the “real” Trek universe falling back in time alongside a faction of angry Romulans who decided to use their future tech to wreck the United Federation of Planets in the past. The movies were more like an extended “Mirror Universe” saga than a story in their own right, and fans appreciated the fact that Beyond felt like the first time those movies had something new and different to say rather than simply rehashing beats and concepts that the classic series had already explored.

Beyond did reprise one major classic story beat: as in the third Star Trek film in the original timeline, the beloved U.S.S. Enterprise got absolutely demolished. But even that echo of an iconic sequence had its own new meaning and purpose in Beyond. Where Star Trek III saw an older Kirk sacrifice Enterprise for the sake of his friend Spock and as a means to prevent apocalyptic technology from falling into enemy hands, this Enterprise’s death came as a shock, a decisive strike by a vastly superior foe that forced Kirk and crew to improvise and demonstrate that their heroism came from within, not as a function of having a cool spaceship. At the same time, Beyond built meaningfully on a rarely explored corner of Trek history with its reveal that the villain was (spoilers!) involved with the pre-Federation Starfleet of Enterprise (the show, not the ship) and rejected the principles of the Federation. Quite a deep cut! But one that worked perfectly for the movie and tied it into the bigger Trek universe, despite its incredibly unlikely director (Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift director Justin Lin).

Beyond worked as both a science-fiction action thriller as well as an ensemble piece. Each of the primary cast members enjoyed a meaningful character arc that didn’t rely on fans’ familiarity with a TV series from the 1960s. And in an era of computer-generated special effects and digital characters, Beyond stood out for sporting some of the most incredible makeup-based practical effects in Hollywood history. That includes the dramatic look the effects team applied to Sofia Boutella for her supporting role as an alien scavenger called Jaylah, who proves to be the villain’s opposite: despite her initial distrust of Federation, she ultimately falls in with the (former) crew of the Enterprise and eventually even joins Starfleet Academy. Beyond was the rare film that worked both for Trek fans (with its deep cuts and respectful treatment of beloved characters) and for mainstream viewers (with a lucid plot, tons of action, and a finale set the “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys).

Why did it fail? Well, why does Star Trek ever fail? The reality is that Trek can only surf that bubble between “pop culture icon” and “for dorks only” for so long before the bubble bursts and the franchise goes with it. In the case of Beyond, it also had to deal with the shifting sands of pop culture. In 2009, JJ Abrams rebooted Trek in the image of Star Wars, the property he truly loved. In 2015, JJ Abrams directed The Force Awakens, the modern revival of Star Wars. Maybe the world simply didn’t have room for two sci-fi space epics helmed by JJ Abrams, especially when one simply retraced the other’s footsteps. In 2016, media culture hung heavily on massive ensemble stories like The Avengers and Game of Thrones, which made Trek’s narrow focus on a single crew on a single spacecraft feel a bit out of touch.

And maybe most of all, the previous Trek movie—Star Trek Into Darkness—may have been the most successful Trek film of all time, but it was also pretty terrible. A bombastic redux of beloved classic Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Into Darkness involved a lot of strange creative choices and relied almost entirely on fans’ familiarity with The Wrath of Khan while in no way improving on that work. Good vibes from Trek ’09 and the presence of marquee names like Benedict Cumberbatch drove the movie to great heights, but the comedown left most people feeling dissatisfied and muted the enthusiasm for Beyond. Ironically, the better film and the better Trek film fared far worse at the box office.

At least it was a short-lived death. Trek was about to undergo a massive revitalization and modernization the following year when it moved to streaming. 2017’s Star Trek Discovery, for all its ups and downs, kicked off a decade of Paramount treating Trek like a truly premium property—the key sales driver for their Paramount+ streaming platform. There have been some genuinely great shows to emerge from that mix, along with some truly awful ones, but it kept Trek in the spotlight for a decade beyond Beyond’s muted demise. And that’s not nothing.

Besides, Beyond may not be the end of the “Kelvinverse” story. The powers that be have been trying to get a fourth film off the ground for years, and maybe now’s the time. This would be the perfect opportunity to round out the “Kelvinverse” with its own Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a meditation on change and aging. The Motion Picture arrived 10 years after Star Trek first went off the airwaves, and we’re 10 years out from Beyond. If Trek really is stuck in one of its recursive time loops, an infinite cycle of cancellations and renewals, it only seems fitting.