"Star Trek": Enterprise marketing

By Jay A. Fernandez

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Remaking a universe is tricky. There''s a risk of destroying the whole thing in the process.

On May 8, Paramount will set out for a new and, it hopes, not final frontier when it relaunches the iconic sci-fi franchise "Star Trek." After 43 years, 10 movies and more than 700 episodes of six TV series, the Melrose studio has bet at least $150 million (and tens of millions more in planned marketing) that Trekkies of all federations again will climb aboard the Starship Enterprise.

But reaching blockbuster status is a challenge only slightly less daunting than the Kobayashi Maru scenario.

The films based on Gene Roddenberry''s 1966 space Western serial have not been mega-hits, and, more importantly, they have failed to draw big audiences in increasingly crucial overseas markets. The top-grossing "Trek" feature was 1996''s "Star Trek: First Contact," which grossed $146 million worldwide, with only $54 million coming from international (1979''s "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" actually has sold the most tickets in the series).

So rather than continue to milk a languishing franchise, Paramount essentially has started over, holding on to core elements of the "Trek" universe while courting a new audience as wide as the galaxy. The studio is gambling that a creative team of pop geeks coupled with a marketing juggernaut can rebirth a billion-dollar franchise the way Warner Bros. rescued the Caped Crusader with 2005''s "Batman Begins" (which laid the groundwork for last year''s mega-grossing "The Dark Knight"). The challenge is even tougher because the "Trek" franchise''s core fans are some of the most ardent in geekdom.

"Our intention was to make ''Star Trek'' something that appeals to everyone who''s ever dismissed it in the past as being too sci-fi or too inaccessible," co-writer Alex Kurtzman says.

Paramount signaled a new direction in the franchise by hiring Kurtzman and co-writer Robert Orci, who wrote the blockbusters

"Mission: Impossible III" and "Transformers." Production president Brad Weston then spent three months convincing producer J.J. Abrams, who directed "M:I-3" but hardly was a "Trek" fanatic, to commit to helming the revamp.

Kurtzman and Orci say they had concerns about corrupting a prized cultural touchstone -- until they hit on a shockingly unexplored angle of the "Trek" mythology.

"There had never been any real story told about how the bridge crew came together," Kurtzman says. "For us, there was only one way to do it, which was to go back to Kirk and Spock."

An origin story revolving around James T. Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, Scotty and Bones not only allowed Abrams to cast young, good-looking actors but also meant the writers could sidestep the legacy guarded slavishly by die-hard fans and craft a story that didn''t rely on everything that had come before.

On the marketing side, Paramount was equally busy constructing an eight-month operation calculated to shift perception of the "Trek" brand without alienating the core.

A bump in the film''s release date from Christmas Day 2008 to May allowed the studio to take footage of the completed film on the road, hoping to show tastemakers that this isn''t your nerdy uncle''s "Star Trek."

In November, Abrams, executive producer Bryan Burk, Paramount vice chairman Rob Moore and some of the cast escorted 20 minutes of the film on a tour that included Rome, Cologne, Madrid, Paris, London and New York. This month, they will head to South Korea and Japan to persuade the media, exhibition and promotional partners of its renewed viability.

Meanwhile, core fans aren''t being ignored. The writers will visit science fiction conventions and continue to interact with Trekkies on fan sites. The previous films and TV series are being released on Blu-ray Disc for the first time. And "Trek" toys and merchandise, which previously catered mostly to adults, will return to stores in April with the largest collection in a decade.  Continued...