Okay, the end date might be a little off, but probably not by much. On the latest episode of The Town podcast they talk about the future of Paramount. Right now, there are two companies vying to buy Paramount: Skydance and Sony. What they only briefly mention in the podcast is that the only way either of these deals can go through, is if some private equity/hedge funds are involved in the deal. As everyone should know by now, once private equity gets involved, their victim isn't long for this world. I don't know how they're going to kill Trek off, but they'll do it.
Imagine the nerd-riots that would ensue if they produced a new movie, and then decided to bin it as a tax write-off.
My sense is, and it's far from expert, the MO for private equity firms is to strip companies they buy for parts and pick the bones clean of those profitable parts as best they can. So it's more likely that they will go for more Trek because that is such a recognizable IP. But they probably would not bother trying to do original series so much as focus in on the more recognizable Kirk/Spock/McCoy version and go from there. I think the likely result is to be aiming for an even more actiony/crowdpleasing version of Trek that is meant to mimic the success of the MCU, if not with the same level of vision of the MCU. Plan a slate of related films, releasing like one every year or so, with a budget slightly greater than a TV show episode. Don't bother trying to line up every bit of canon to what has been done since 1966 As someone who feels like more Trek is generally better than less and who has found something to enjoy in virtually all Trek, I don't necessarily oppose this plan.
Speaking of IP, didja know that because Roddenberry so sliced and diced it that one of the reasons why we didn't get a lot of Trek or Trek merch until fairly recently is that nobody knew who owned what? When Paramount and Viacom got merged back together a few years ago, that sorted some of it out simply by the fact that they were all one company again. Meaning if Viacom (which held the TV merch rights, I think) sold the movie merch rights (that Paramount owns), nobody really gave a shit. So, when the private equity folks start trying to carve shit up, they're going to run into that as an issue. Another issue that they're going to run into is that nobody's certain who was sold what rights in some cases. Someone may have gotten the rights to produce this or that model/toy/whatever tied to a specific season or series, while someone else may have gotten the rights for something else. If a rebooted TOS becomes hugely popular, do the companies who originally purchased the rights for TOS stuff have the rights to make new toys, etc.? Or does the reboot count as something entirely separate? (And remember, it doesn't matter what the law says, when there's money to be made, people are going to be suing.) Additionally, some of the companies that Roddenberry sold rights to are no longer in business. Did those rights die with the company? Or did the company sell those rights to another company before they died? And what happens if that company died? This isn't merely me blovating about the subject, either. There was an article that came out when the first JJ Trek was released talking about how big of a nightmare it was to sort out who held the rights to what, and how the folks in charge at Paramount and Viacom were largely guessing. And it isn't unheard of for a company to discover that some other company they'd bought up decades ago owned the rights to something that everybody had forgotten about, and now that a third company is making all kinds of money selling stuff that the one company owns the rights to, they're gonna go to court and sue.
