4/30/2023 0 Comments Action movie fx guru![]() ![]() They hired Robert Wise, the director of West Side Story, The Sound of Music and The Andromeda Strain to direct, with a budget that was supposed to be capped at $15 million, which was five million more than Star Wars and would eventually run to almost three times that number. Then, Star Wars came out, and Paramount opted to make Trek their next big franchise, hoping to outdo Star Wars. He was to be replaced by a Vulcan character named Xon, to be played by David Gautreaux, while Persis Kambatta was hired to play Ilia, the ship’s navigator. The first season was set to run thirteen episodes and would have included all of the original cast except for Leonard Nimoy, who was in a legal battle with the studio over the use of his likeness in merchandise. Plans were made to produce another big-budget TV show called Phase 2, which was supposed to front a Paramount-branded TV network, which never came to fruition. ![]() While the series had only run three seasons on tv, when it was sold into syndication, the show became a monster cult hit, to the extent that the waters were tested when Paramount produced an animated series that played to surprising critical acclaim. Into the fray came Paramount Pictures, who must have thought they had the inside track as they owned perhaps the biggest sci-fi property of all, Star Trek. There were also dozens of Italian knockoffs like Starcrash and The Humanoid. There were brilliant ones, like Ridley Scott’s Alien, which subverted the formula, and then entertaining flicks like Disney’s The Black Hole, and even the James Bond movie, Moonraker, which takes a hard turn into sci-fi in the finale, sending 007 to space and even including Star Wars style laser battles in the finale. Clearly, the appetite for science fiction was strong, and by 1979, theaters were flooded with Star Wars clones. Universal pulled a double when a few months later they released the pilot of ANOTHER Star Wars knockoff they made, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and it made $21 million. It made a stunning $41.8 million internationally, a considerable number considering it was just a TV episode that had already aired on TV. Star Wars was still making a mint, and Universal took the pilot episode for a Star Wars-knock-off series they developed, Battlestar Galactica, and released it in theaters. In this episode of Revisited, we dig into Star Trek: The Motion Picture.įlashback to 1978. This led to Star Trek getting a crack at the big screen, with the original crew headlining a movie that, at the time, was one of the most expensive movies ever made. Star Wars changed that thinking, and suddenly studios were bending over backwards flooding theaters with their own sci-fi epics. Until then, the idea of an epic sci-fi fantasy grossing hundreds of millions of dollars was considered laughable, and the genre was regarded as B-movie material at best. In 1977, a movie you might have heard of called STAR WARS came out and thoroughly shifted the kind of movies Hollywood considered blockbusters. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |