Chris Pine Knows How To Save Star Trek And He’s 100% Right
Chris Pine is a Hollywood veteran with many movies under his belt, but he is still most famous for portraying Captain Kirk in the prequel film Star Trek (2009). Proving that he’s just as much a hero offscreen as well, Pine recently addressed the problem with Paramount’s approach to these films while attending ACE Superhero Comic Con 2024. There, he argued for creating smaller-budget films that appeal to “diehards,” claiming that “we should make films that appeal to people who want to see the film” and that he’s “sick of trying to please people who don’t want to see what we do.”
Calling Out Paramount
Whether or not you liked Chris Pine in the Star Trek prequel films, his words here are enough to make the most jaded fans cry out “O captain, my captain!” That’s due in large part to how blunt he was regarding the creative failures of the very prequels that helped make him a household name.
Specifically, he called out Paramount for not appealing to the built-in fanbase because the studio was obsessed with making as much money as possible.
Focusing Too Much On Action
According to Chris Pine, the core audience for those Kelvinverse films were “the diehards,” and he said (channeling Star Trek fans everywhere) that Paramount should focus more on making films that appeal to those hardcore fans rather than “trying to please people who don’t want to see what we do.”
While he didn’t get into the gritty details, it sounds like he is calling out Paramount for doing things like making every cinematic Trek adventure a breathless action film when this is a franchise built on more mellow concepts like exploration, understanding, and philosophy.
The Stakes Are Too High
Before you write off all of Chris Pine’s thoughts here as simple pandering or pie-in-the-sky hopes, you should know that he is very clear-eyed about the problems facing Star Trek and other major Hollywood franchises.
He pointed out Hollywood’s obsession with making big-budget blockbusters, saying that it takes “half a billion dollars to make these films that you like” (we’re assuming he’s counting the cost of marketing into this).
These huge production costs mean that “for it to be considered successful and everyone to be paid back, you have to make extraordinary amounts of money.”
Smaller Films
Chris Pine seems to think Paramount has backed themselves into a corner with Star Trek films, embracing the mentality that each one of them needs to have a budget big enough to make Quark’s eyes bulge out.
Then, because of the outsized budget, there is the perceived need to make the film appeal to as many people as humanly possible. The end result is the worst of both worlds: a film that appeals neither to general audiences nor franchise diehards and simply flops.
Perhaps reading our minds (maybe Chris Pine has picked up some mild telepathy from starring alongside Star Trek’s most famous Vulcan for so long), the actor proposed a simple solution for Paramount.
“I think we just make a much smaller film that’s more story-driven, more character-based, there’s less sh*t exploding…Also shoot it on film, not digital. And then you have the fanbase.”
The Fanbase
With what appeared to be genuine humility and grace, Chris Pine then described how the “The [Star Trek] fanbase has always been very kind to me.”
He sees this as a rich fandom that has always done right by him, and now he wants to do right by the fans. Only time will tell, though, if the studio will do the same.
As for us, we’d love to see Chris Pine and crew return for a scaled-back Star Trek 4—certainly, an intimate adventure with this cast sounds much more fun than Paramount’s plan for yet another Star Trek origin film.
Plus, with the franchise running the Mirror Universe into the ground, the Kelvinverse is arguably the most exciting alternate reality the franchise still has. Here’s hoping it makes a return before all of Star Trek disappears (ahem) into darkness under Paramount’s leadership.
