How Paramount Buying Warner Bros. Will Save Star Trek From Itself

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 9 seconds ago

After a heated bidding war with Netflix and more than a little behind-the-scenes drama, it looks like Paramount will be purchasing Warner Bros. This acquisition is upsetting to fans for many reasons. Some worry that it’s creatively dangerous to have so many popular IPs under one roof. Others worry that further changes in company leadership (coming right after Paramount’s merger with Skydance, no less) will spell bad news for their favorite movies and shows.

Nobody has been more nervous than Star Trek fans, many of whom are worried that new leadership will end up running this venerable franchise into the ground. To those fans, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the NuTrek era has already done its best to destroy the franchise. The good news is that Paramount’s upcoming acquisition will almost certainly save Star Trek by pulling everyone’s favorite shows off of Paramount+ (the world’s worst streamer), and putting them on the much more popular HBO Max.

Star Trek By The Numbers

While I have enjoyed some of the NuTrek era (Season 1-2 of Discovery, Season 3 of Picard, and most of Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds), the blunt truth is that not enough people were streaming these shows on Paramount+. With the exception of Picard (which, at Patrick Stewart’s request, was limited to three seasons), every single NuTrek show was canceled early. We can endlessly debate the merits of individual shows, but the simple truth is that Paramount wouldn’t kill these various Star Trek series if they were making the company money.

One thing I rarely see fans acknowledge, though, is that much of NuTrek might have been doomed in the first place. The execs used Star Trek: Discovery to launch CBS All Access, the streaming network that would become Paramount+. While that streamer has grown its numbers over the years, it’s still very much the underdog. Right now, Paramount+ has about 77 million subscribers, which pales in comparison to HBO Max’s 132 million. Of course, both of them pale in comparison to Netflix, which has 325 million subscribers around the world.

The Data Doesn’t Lie

Before Paramount decided to launch its own streamer, most Star Trek shows were on Netflix. There, it was extremely popular. According to FlixPatrol, for example, fans spent over 175 million hours watching The Next Generation in 2023 alone. Eventually, Paramount brought all Star Trek content (except for that redheaded stepchild, Prodigy) over to Paramount+. This was an attempt to establish their streamer as the home of all things Trek. Unfortunately, it seems clear that this has siloed the franchise by putting all shows (new and old) on one of the least popular streaming platforms.

My hope for the Warner Bros. acquisition is simple. When the dust settles, we are going to end up with one streamer that has all of the Paramount and WB content on it. If that were to happen today, there would be about 200 million people (the amount of Paramount+ and HBO Max subscribers combined) for this new platform. With nearly three times as many potential viewers, any new Star Trek show is going to have a much wider audience. If NuTrek defenders are right and these are great shows that never found an audience, this might be the easy solution: increasing the audience by 300%.

Bringing Star Trek Back To Life

If the shows still fail to find an audience on a much larger platform, then the creators of Star Trek will need to realize a very bitter lesson: they’re the problem, and audiences simply aren’t buying what they’re selling. However, that means we’ll finally get some much-needed leadership changes that start with kicking Alex Kurtzman to the curb. At that point, it will be up to newer writers and execs to see if they can find a way to make the best sci-fi franchise ever made relevant again. 

As a film and TV lover, I don’t love everything about Paramount buying Warner Bros. I don’t love what this will do to the movie theater industry, I don’t love the CEO’s politics, and I don’t love how the whole thing has the mouthfeel of a monopoly. But as a Star Trek fan, I can’t help but be hopeful because the franchise is about to get new creators, a better streaming platform, and a much larger audience. Ahead of its 60th anniversary, Trek could be on the cusp of a genuine resurgence, and that’s news good enough to put a smile even on a Vulcan’s face!