I May Have Called It Wrong

Not about Strange New Worlds being hot garbage. No, question it will be, it’s still being produced by Bad Robot’s bastard step-child Secret Hideout. The same crew that fucked up Star Trek Discovery and Picard. It can’t help but be terrible…

… If it is ever produced.

There may not be a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Yes, they made the announcement but this is 2020. A show announcement doesn’t mean what it used to. In the good old days, way back in 2017, you didn’t announce a show until you had everything locked down. The cast, the crew, and the funding.

A lot of people want to know why a show as bad AND as expensive as Star Trek Discovery got a second season? Especially, as there were frequent grumblings from CBS All-Access executives about how the show wasn’t generating the kind subscriptions they had been looking for.

Why did ST:D get a second season, if it wasn’t making money?

The answer is that the first two seasons were already paid for.

Netflix got a little too excited by all of the hype when Discovery was announced and snapped up the foreign streaming rights for an absurd amount of money. Worse still they locked themselves into a multi-year contract.

Fast forward to the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas where Patrick Stewart stepped out on stage and announced that, “Jean-Luc Picard, is BACK.” At that time the international distribution rights hadn’t been sold. Secret Hideout was hoping that the hype would be too big for Netflix to pass on it.

And Netflix did have the right of first refusal on any sequels to ST:D. However, the Big N had a good laugh when Kurtzman and the company shopped Picard to them. They had a good laugh and slammed the door in their faces.

Jeff Bezos on the other hand was apparently tickled by the idea of owning any part of Star Trek and coughed up the dough for Picard. Well, not so much coughed up as drooled-up. Allegedly, the amount that Kurtzman wanted and the amount Amazon ended up paying were drastically different. None the less the project moved forward on a more meager budget and Jean-Luc Picard was debased for the amusement of SJWs.

Realizing he has a good thing going, Kurtzman and Company made a big announcement for Star Trek: Section 31 also without funding. And it has quietly disappeared. Not actually canceled you understand, just politely memory-holed because no one would pick up the bill for it.

So now, it’s 2020 and a big announcement has been made for Star Trek: Pike. Amazon has not yet said, yes. Although they haven’t said, no either. In its original iteration, Strange New Worlds was supposed to take place ten years before the OG series.

This next bit, I must stress is rumor, but rumor from a source that has been reliable in the past.

Since this is yet another ST:D spin-off Netflix again had right of first refual and hastily said, no. Kurtzman and Goldman were expecting that and were okay with it because they preferred Amazon as funding partner and they were tailoring the pitch to address what Amazon viewed as Picard’s drawbacks.

Then right after the announcement but before the pitch-meeting a land mine went off.

The land mine in question:

Plinkett’s take down, allegedly, drove a big wedge between Secret Hideout and Amazon, sending the negotiations back to square one.

Allegedly, Amazon has now made it clear, they expect Pike out of the Captain’s Chair and Kirk in it by the end of the first season or it’s no deal. Secret Hideout isn’t upset by this demand. I mean, sure, Kurtzman and his friends were willing to settle for White Shaming Picard but the guy they obviously want to get their hands on is Kirk.

However, James T. Kirk is the last siege gun that Paramount has and is very leery about handing him over to a guy with this bad of a track record. The rumor is that Paramount doesn’t trust Secret Hideout with the last of the unsullied Crown Jewels. They won’t release Kirk to Kurtzman and without Kirk, there is no deal at Amazon.

We can only hope that this project fades quietly away like Section 31 did.

Okay, I’m done here.