Section 31 Director Implies There May Be More Star Trek Streaming Films On The Way: "Sky's The Limit With What We Can Do"
Paramount seems to be bracing for a failure with the forthcoming Star Trek streaming movie, Section 31, but the director gave an interview implying more streaming movies like this will be coming.
Alex Kurtzman has turned Star Trek into something completely unrecognizable from its previous form. With Star Trek: Discovery, Lower Decks, and Picard, fans don’t see any optimistic future of human exceptionalism seeking out new life and new civilizations. The shows explore strange, new genders more than they explore strange new worlds.
As a result, ratings for Discovery proved to be very low, resulting in its cancelation after a fifth season, even though they had planned to go seven. Despite this, the powers that be at Star Trek are taking Michell Yeoh’s mirror universe character from Discovery and giving her a film with Section 31.
The trailer promised a dark, gritty Star Trek, which we’ve seen before and fans have rejected. Most fans don’t want to see Section 31 explored outside of Deep Space 9, and its presentation failed to resonate with viewers.
The Paramount+ official trailer has 2.2 million views but only 3.5K likes as of the end of December, with a whopping 16K dislikes. That’s a 4.5x factor of dislikes to likes and very little engagement at all, considering how many views it has.
Section 31 was not always made to be a streaming movie, however. It appears to be a jumbled mess coming from a Paramount board room gung ho on the project even though they seemed to know it would be a failure from the get go.
Development of Section 31 started with Alex Kurtzman wanting to do a full spinoff series starring Michelle Yeoh reprising her mirror universe role of Phillippa Georgiou who first appeared in Star Trek: Discovery. After the network axed that idea, they kept pushing the concept according to director Olatunde Osunsanmi.
He told SFX magazine, “It has been retooled so much, the two stories are completely unrecognizable, and Craig Sweeny, the writer, has been in the middle of that [for] the whole process. He’s been in a situation to have written – I think – seven different iterations of this. When I say seven different iterations, the first iteration was six episodes of the first season of Section 31. The second iteration was another five episodes of Section 31 which were completely different than the previous iteration. Then the fourth, fifth and sixth were multiple pilots that were outlines, then we had the movie, and the movie itself went through a couple of iterations.”
This implies chaos in the writers’ room, with so many rewrites and retoolings being uncommon for TV shows like Star Trek.
However, Osunsanmi voiced optimism for the project implying more such streaming movies may be on the way for Star Trek, “Hopefully the fans love Section 31 and love this format, and we’re able to continue this format with other stories and be able to expand the universe so much faster, because it doesn’t have to all be television series. It can just be one pop, one pop, one pop. If the audience – the fans – they love it, the sky’s the limit with what we can do… I think I might get into a bit of trouble if I expand upon that. But I think as long as there’s love from the audience, there’s incredible fertile ground that was laid with Section 31 to continue to grow the franchise and grow the world. The door’s open.”
This comes as a direct contradiction to actor Rob Kazinsky who also interviewed with SFX magazine, but voicing his fears about Trek fans rejecting the project. I'm terrified of how it's going to be received, because it's not the Trek people want,” Kazinsky said.
With initial reception of the trailer, it doesn’t look like Section 31 is going to be a success, so fans can rest for now that there won’t likely be more of these type of films coming from the Alex Kurtzman camp unless something shocking happens when the film gets released on January 24th.
Do you want more films like Section 31 out of Star Trek? Leave a comment and let us know.
For a great alternative to modern Star Trek, with sci-fi spy thriller action, read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!
Because churning out streaming content proved wonders for Star Wars and Disney+... oh wait.