Berman discusses past Trek failures

From scifyportal, "All the talk might be about "Star Trek XI," but if you're someone who is no longer involved like say former executive producer Rick Berman, you have to keep your head in the past. Berman recently talked with the official Star Trek Magazine about some of the past Star Trek movies he was involved with, and shared some of his reasons for stickiing with Patrick Stewart and Co. from "Star Trek: Next Generation" for the commercial failure "Star Trek: Nemesis."

"Star Trek was going through some changes," Berman said, according to SciFi Pulse. "['Star Trek: Deep Space Nine] had ended. ['Star Trek: Voyager'] had ended. 'Voyager's' ratings had not fared at all that well. ['Star Trek: Enterprise'] was on the air and struggling. I think that the studio was not in a big rush. Patrick Stewart was kind of busy. There was a sense I was getting from the studio that perhaps the next film we produced might be better off if we did it with a new cast.

"I felt, right or wrong, that because we were introducing a new cast with 'Enterprise' that to introduce a new cast almost simultaneously [for the movie] was not a good idea. I felt that it had been awhile, four years I beleive, since the audience had seen Picard and Co., that we should give the cast of 'The Next Generation' another shot."

But what caused "Nemesis" to be the only movie of 10 in the Star Trek line to actually bomb? Many critics point to the fact that it opened just days before "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," but Berman believes other factors had to be involved.
"I don't think that's a valid complaint because if that were true, we would have done better in other countries where it did not open close to that film," Berman said. "I don't know what to blame it on. The reviews of the film were, I would say, 80 percent miserable, as were the opening weekend numbers. It went against the tracking, the quite scientific approach the studios use to determine how a film is going to do. The film did nowhere near as well as the tracking results had predicted."

Berman said he wanted a good segue between the original "Star Trek" cast and that of "The Next Generation" when "Star Trek Generations" came around in 1994, and even had a big-name director (at least in Trekdom) chosen to take it on.

"When it came time to select a director, after everybody was happy with the script, the first person we agreed we would go talk to was Leonard Nimoy," Berman said. "Leonard was not pleased with the script. He wanted to do some pretty dramatic work on redeveloping the script and there was a lot of differing opinions on what evolved at that point, but let it be said there were disagreements and the end result was that there was a bit of a falling out and Leonard's involvement with the project did not happen."

For more of Berman's discussion about past Star Trek movies, check out Sci-Fi Pulse's transcription by clicking here.