Star Trek Beyond **SPOILERS FROM POST 566 ONWARD**

Beefy78

The rule of thumb is that it needs to double its budget at the box office to break even.

Fysh

Beefy78 wrote: »

The rule of thumb is that it needs to double its budget at the box office to break even.

True, but the marketing costs aren't accounted for in that version, and as they have started to increase (due to an increasing reliance on non-domestic takings driving up overall marketing spend) it's no longer necessarily accurate.

Beefy78

That's the double. They need to make the money back and then one more time to account for the marketing spend.

BlitzKrieg

Beefy78 wrote: »

That's the double. They need to make the money back and then one more time to account for the marketing spend.

It's not so much the marketing cost but a general rule of thumb.


People say it's marketing cost but studios always had the double the budget in the opening few months policy going well back to at least the late 70s

Marketing costs can be made back over time easily via dvd and tv sales the time restraint on making it back quickly is for the slate

The logic is a film that makes twice can pay off investors and fund amother film of similar size straight away in the next slate.

Not making double back quickly means cutting down the predicted size of the next slate which means less projects and less work.

For the specific franchise or director it means how quickly turn around is for them. Getting double your budget means getting fast tracked.


On average films that do double get fast tracked into a 2 year turn around while films that do below that could see a 4 year turn around or none at all if it's destressingly low.

There will always be exceptions but the 2 year rule is less to do with making back money, the film industry has a lot of ways to make money off a film but more about how quickly a follow up or another project by the director/studio is put through production.

pixelburp

Not to be snarky or anything, but would the marketing budget for Beyond even be that big, 'cos it felt like there was very little promotion (relatively speaking) in the run-up to this. The 50th year of Star Trek and there was barely a whisper from Paramount, even when the film was only a couple of months away.

Beefy78

Mate I don't know if you work with any marketing people but it won't take much to run up a $185m bill. A few billboards and a trailer during Fair City will do it

BlitzKrieg

Beefy78 wrote: »

Mate I don't know if you work with any marketing people but it won't take much to run up a $185m bill. A few billboards and a trailer during Fair City will do it

It would but studios like paramount would pay in bulk for blockbuster season, its why you sometimes find its the same billboard and the same slot in fair city's break that is one week advertising teenage mutant ninja turtles 2 and the next week Star Trek Beyond and the week after that is advertising Ben Hur.

pixelburp

Beefy78 wrote: »

Mate I don't know if you work with any marketing people but it won't take much to run up a $185m bill. A few billboards and a trailer during Fair City will do it

I have in the past as it happens! - and would run a mile from that industry as a consequence, but that's another story - but by Blockbuster standards, Star Trek: Beyond seemed to get what amounted to promotional lip-service. I'd be genuinely surprised if the marketing bill was that large,' cos I'd openly wonder what it went into: it certainly wasn't the advertising of a major motion picture.

I'd have to go back and check but I'm fairly sure there was next to zero buzz coming from Paramount up until a couple of weeks before first release. When you think of the aggressive campaigns of sibling films that summer such as the Marvel/DC franchises, Beyond got very little traction in comparison.

In fact, given the 50th anniversary itself came & went with barely an acknowledgement from CBS / Paramount, the studios don't seem to care that much about Trek generally, the new TV series notwithstanding.

Fysh

Beefy78 wrote: »

That's the double. They need to make the money back and then one more time to account for the marketing spend.

The way I heard it is that they need to make double because a very rough on-average breakdown of the split between film distributors and film exhibitors works out as 50:50 - so making double only gets back your production budget.

How big or small the marketing spend for a particular film happens to be is hard to say, but this seems to be the logic that gets bounced around. It's rare that hard numbers get announced, unfortunately.

BlitzKrieg

I have in the past as it happens! - and would run a mile from that industry as a consequence, but that's another story - but by Blockbuster standards, Star Trek: Beyond seemed to get what amounted to promotional lip-service. I'd be genuinely surprised if the marketing bill was that large,' cos I'd openly wonder what it went into: it certainly wasn't the advertising of a major motion picture.

paramount has been low key throughout this entire season with their marketing, they pretty much gave every one of the titles this year the exact same lip service process in terms of marketing.

(list of paramount films so far this year: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/studio/chart/?view2=release&view=company&studio=paramount.htm)


You can see all their big films pretty much had the same marketing process this year so I think they've put a knife to their entire marketing department as a whole this year.

ScumLord

.ak wrote: »

Found it a bit dull tbh... Fairly unoriginal and uninteresting... and I say that as a fan of the new series!

I thought the Dredd film was pretty good. It suffered a lot from budget, the city didn't look all that futuristic and it didn't really borrow all that much from the comic. It was pretty much an action film with some dredd elements thrown in but what they did put in from dredd was done well.

cowboyBuilder

Finally got to see this, well it was a big improvement from Into Darkness but still far off from Star Trek

Too much boring action - and it's not that I don't like action - the action from the 1st one was fantastic, but this was just silly - the motorbike with the amber dust ??? nah ... yawn.

But the plot was good and I did like the ending.

MisterAnarchy

I only got around to watching this now as I had avoided it because of Pegg's involvement in the script and Lin as director.
I thought it would be crap and boy was it a turd.

The plot was like something written by a child ,it was so childish and silly.
The laws of physics were completely disregarded ,with indestructible ships bouncing off planets .
No suspense ,too much cgi,massive plot holes ,unfunny jokes, just incoherent trash.

Scotty and Bones were like 2 pieces of wood ,really hamming everything up .
Their jokes were terrible and very irritating.

This was not Star Trek ,I think Lin thought he was making Fast and Furious in space.
By a mile the worst Star Trek film made,a disgrace.

Arriviamo1903

It really is awful, there is no depth to the characters, give me Picaard, Riker, data etc anyday over these clowns.

I watched it a few months back and can't recall a single moment of it other than a complete and utter hatred of Simon Pegg. It's the most unStar Tek of Star Trek films, this big, dumb, loud and over the top action spectacle feels more like a Corman knock-off than an actual Trek film. The decision to allow Pegg to script was a poor one and his muddled, simplistic and banal script lacks any sort of bite. The set pieces look great but feel small, the villain lacks any depth and the film's big moments such as the Sabotage scene don't work, they just feel forced and cheap.

Star Trek Beyond is not a bad, bad film, it's something so much worse, it's boring. With a runtime of just under two hours, the film feels overlong and underdeveloped. There's no breathing room and none of the emotional moments have any impact and the whole thing feels like a vanity effort from Pegg, given how he works himself into pretty much every scene and when he isn't on screen he has characters talking about him.

I like Lin and he's a damn good action director but Pegg gave him nothing to work with here, it's such an awful script and it's obvious that Pegg has no interest of love for Trek and what it stands for, much like Abrams go at a Star Trek Film, Beyond feels less like a Star Trek film and more like Pegg desperately trying to impress someone at Disney so they will let him work on a Star Wars film.

AMKC

Deleted User wrote: »

I watched it a few months back and can't recall a single moment of it other than a complete and utter hatred of Simon Pegg. It's the most unStar Tek of Star Trek films, this big, dumb, loud and over the top action spectacle feels more like a Corman knock-off than an actual Trek film. The decision to allow Pegg to script was a poor one and his muddled, simplistic and banal script lacks any sort of bite. The set pieces look great but feel small, the villain lacks any depth and the film's big moments such as the Sabotage scene don't work, they just feel forced and cheap.

Star Trek Beyond is not a bad, bad film, it's something so much worse, it's boring. With a runtime of just under two hours, the film feels overlong and underdeveloped. There's no breathing room and none of the emotional moments have any impact and the whole thing feels like a vanity effort from Pegg, given how he works himself into pretty much every scene and when he isn't on screen he has characters talking about him.

I like Lin and he's a damn good action director but Pegg gave him nothing to work with here, it's such an awful script and it's obvious that Pegg has no interest of love for Trek and what it stands for, much like Abrams go at a Star Trek Film, Beyond feels less like a Star Trek film and more like Pegg desperately trying to impress someone at Disney so they will let him work on a Star Wars film.

I don,t think its Pegg you should be blaming if you don,t like the film. Its Paramount. Pegg had a much more Star Trek like script wrote but he was told by Paramount bosses to go back and rewrite it as they were not happy with it. They gave him very little time to do it so it was all wrote and then shot on a very tight timeframe. Maybe Pegg did work himself into every scence but I don,t think he did. Beyond feels a lot more like Star Trek than the second JJ film which was just terrible.
The film does not deserve the panning you gave it sure it ain,t perfect its an average film at best but its still fun and is much better than the 2nd new one. If you don,t like a film just say that but let other people decide what they think for themselves.

AMKC

AMKC wrote: »

I don,t think its Pegg you should be blaming if you don,t like the film. Its Paramount. Pegg had a much more Star Trek like script wrote but he was told by Paramount bosses to go back and rewrite it as they were not happy with it. They gave him very little time to do it so it was all wrote and then shot on a very tight timeframe. Maybe Pegg did work himself into every scence but I don,t think he did. Beyond feels a lot more like Star Trek than the second JJ film which was just terrible.
The film does not deserve the panning you gave it sure it ain,t perfect its an average film at best but its still fun and is much better than the 2nd new one. If you don,t like a film just say that but let other people decide what they think for themselves.

Pegg can try and put the blame on any number of people but the films biggest issue was his woeful script and he went above and beyond making it all about him. I flicked through a bit of it earlier and sure enough, if he isn't on screen, characters are talking about him. Star Trek Into Darkness was vastly superior to Beyond, it was at least cinematic and the set pieces were impressive whereas every aspect of Beyond is just poor. It's a bad film, a boring and pointless waste of everyone's time and effort. It's like a lesser Star Wars entry wrapped up in a Trek hoodie desperately trying to be something more than just below average.

pixelburp

By no means did I find 'Beyond' a great film, but I don't think it deserves anywhere near the criticism it's receiving here: in fact I'm more than a little perplexed about some of the comments about it, as of the three 'Kelvinverse' films this felt the most overly Trek to me, not the least.

Into Darkness and the 2009 reboot were as far from the ethos and tone of classic Star Trek as you could get (though arguably at this stage the 'classic' template is built more off TNG than the campier 60s model) with shallow melodrama stapled onto amped-up spectacle & almost none of the voyager (not the show) heart from television. 'Beyond' at least felt like an attempt to merge some of the emotional beats of the smarter 80s films (Kirk's malaise over out-living his own father echoed Shatners version growing old & irrelevant), while the actual plot could have been lifted from any episode of the TV show, still keeping its heart of exploration & discovery.

I certainly didn't like the flippancy with which the Enterprise was trashed & some of the action scenes were very disorientating & muddled, but the notion of the film being the most 'unTrek' feels misplaced to me. Even if it were tampered with by the studio you could clearly tell this was a film written by someone who understood Star Trek's core, as opposed to the Orci / Kurtzman variant, that almost seemed ashamed of the lineage.

MisterAnarchy

Deleted User wrote: »

I watched it a few months back and can't recall a single moment of it other than a complete and utter hatred of Simon Pegg. It's the most unStar Tek of Star Trek films, this big, dumb, loud and over the top action spectacle feels more like a Corman knock-off than an actual Trek film. The decision to allow Pegg to script was a poor one and his muddled, simplistic and banal script lacks any sort of bite. The set pieces look great but feel small, the villain lacks any depth and the film's big moments such as the Sabotage scene don't work, they just feel forced and cheap.

Star Trek Beyond is not a bad, bad film, it's something so much worse, it's boring. With a runtime of just under two hours, the film feels overlong and underdeveloped. There's no breathing room and none of the emotional moments have any impact and the whole thing feels like a vanity effort from Pegg, given how he works himself into pretty much every scene and when he isn't on screen he has characters talking about him.

I like Lin and he's a damn good action director but Pegg gave him nothing to work with here, it's such an awful script and it's obvious that Pegg has no interest of love for Trek and what it stands for, much like Abrams go at a Star Trek Film, Beyond feels less like a Star Trek film and more like Pegg desperately trying to impress someone at Disney so they will let him work on a Star Wars film.

I agree 100% with everything you have said ,in fact its exactly what I thought about the film too.

I liked Into Darkness ,sure it has it faults but its a masterpiece compared to Beyond.

The film does not deserve the panning you gave it sure it ain't perfect its an average film at best but its still fun and is much better than the 2nd new one.

There is that word,fun .
Whenever I see a film being referred to as fun ,it usually means its moronic twaddle .
Pegg attempted to make it funny ,he tried so hard but that was the problem,it wasnt funny ,it was irritating .

You could clearly tell this was a film written by someone who understood Star Trek's core, as opposed to the Orci / Kurtzman variant, that almost seemed ashamed of the lineage.

Into Darkness was a dark film but it holds true to alot of the Star Trek cores ,its largely a rehash of The Wrath of Khan and it borrows elements of the dark tones of TNG vs The Borg and even Nemesis.
Beyond was like one of those bad camp episodes of the 60's show .