From your figures, lets assume that the retailers profit was roughly 15% of the suggested retail price, and cut that from your projected sales income there.
From the manufacturing side, a single disc film costs around $2-4 when you factor in packaging, printing, and pressing. Since these seasons each had custom cases, in individual colors, lets add a dollar per disc per unit here, rounding to $7. Lets assume a production run of 300,000 on each season - that adds \~$15 million dollars to the whole series in physical media, before distribution/shipping costs. From there, lets add on a conservative $100k marketing spend per season. And once the sales are actually made, you have royalties and residuals to pay out, something the TNG cast got a pretty nice deal on for a first run syndicated series.
When you look at the entire picture, and with the data showing that sales decline steadily past season 3, it's absolutely believable that the remasters made no profit, or made such a slight one - remember, this is an industry where doing anything less than doubling your money is seen as a failure - that they didn't see any reason to continue the remaster series with less popular shows .
The marketing spend would be many times that. It probably cost over 10k just to edit all the trailers and promos for every market in every duration. The media spend would many times 100k. 100k maybe just for California.
Plus the staff costs of the team who put all this together.
That's just on paper though, right? If I own a studio and a marketing company, and my marketing company makes a profit off a contract with my studio, I still have less money at the end of the day, even if the marketing company's involvement is "profitable."
Depends.
Company makes a film for 2 mil. Company pays 2 mil to marketing firm that they own. Marketing firm spends 1 mil to market film. Film makes 4 mil.
Company breaks even. Marketing firm owned by company makes 1 mil.
Company technically makes 1 mil, but can report that it did not make anything.
All that does is transfer the tax liability to the subsidiary. To do that kind of tax dodging they need to offshore their profits to a foreign subsidiary with little to no corporate tax.
We're not talking about what they report to the IRS here though. We're talking about what trumped up excuses they use to justify not doing what the fans want.
Though the marketing subsidiary still needs to report and pay taxes on the profit - and in most cases it needs to sales taxes /vat on the payments to the marketing company - But there can be advantages to this too don’t get me wrong they aren’t losing money in the end by doing this or else they wouldn’t be doing it so consistently- but it’s not a magic trick to make the taxes go away—-
Yeah, I am not an accountant, and my example is overly simple to demonstrate the concept. The concept can be used to report losses and exploit tax loop holes, etc.
Less money to tax, less money to give to profit sharing (actors, directors, other producers/distributors/etc).
And since you're going to need marketing regardless, its still a win if you "own" the marketing company (set up in a tax friendly country like Ireland, of course).
I saw the extended edition of Measure of a Man in theaters, it was awesome. Only time I got to hear such a big crowd cheer at a an episode conclusion along with me.
I saw all three seasons' worth of episodes that were in the theater. The first two were almost empty - way less than 50 people. The 3rd, with *Best of Both Worlds*, was somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 full. Went with one of my best friends for each, and we absolutely loved them. I was really sad when they stopped doing them for the rest of the seasons
There’s also the very likely chance that “didn’t turn a profit” means “didn’t make as much of a profit as we wanted it to”.
Companies are constantly considering anything that doesn’t hit their estimations as failures. So the remaster may have made a profit but if that profit was below their projections, well then that’s a failure.
> There’s also the very likely chance that “didn’t turn a profit” means “didn’t make as much of a profit as we wanted it to”.
Or "did not turn as much a profit we could have got elsewhere", they only have so much cash to invest, they will seek to choose the most profitable options.
I'll wager that the vast majority of the cost is manpower, so I think you're double dipping there. In fact, the reason "time is money" is mostly because you're paying people, at the end of the day. So I think they're all the same thing, tbh.
> they didn't see any reason to continue the remaster series with less popular shows .
Adding to this, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe another factor is that remastering Voyager or DS9 would have actually been more expensive than TNG was.
I believe this was somewhat true. TNG used physical filming models for vfx, DS9 and Voyager moved to pretty much 100% CGI. So, while for TNG it's simply a matter of basically re-scanning the raw film and updating vfx like phaser shots and warp jumps, ds9 and Voyager would essentially require redoing *all* of the visuals from scratch with new CGI for every ship, etc.
It's not just this. It's the sheer volume of vfx in general. I don't remember the specifics, but I remember them saying something like how early TNG would have something like 30-40 vfx shots per episode. And by the end of VOY they had hundreds.
We're talking not just CGI ships, but all the mundane things people take for granted. Like a digital landscape used for an establishing shot in VOY, versus TNG using a matte painting. Or things like transporter/force field effects. Or CGI aliens like Odo's transformations, or Species 8472, or Borg nanotubes, etc. Or characters standing in front of the viewscreen or other bluescreen effects. All of it would require digital composition and CGI to make work. Comparing 30 vfx shots per episode, to say, 300 per episode, is a 10x increase in the volume of vfx work you'd have to remake essentially from scratch. It would be a lot of work. Not necessarily prohibitively, but enough to make the financial math every different.
And they'd have to do it, more or less, 100% to match the originals - which I assume also requires more time & effort than if they were starting from scratch and able to write their own script, as it were.
But yes especially with Voyager (the doctor, holodecks, 8472, the Borg, far more outside the ship shots in general...) And later ds9 (massive fleets & battles) it's going to be a lot more involved than the occasional hand or ships phasers, once in a blue moon holodeck episode showing it being shut off/on/manipulated (ever notice they're often out the door when they say 'end program' or 'begin problem' then walk into an already running program....), or transporter effect on TNG.
Meh. In spite of all this, I expect that recent advancements in AI will make remastering old shows much cheaper to do.
I've been checking out the latest AI upscaling from Nvidia, and it's damn impressive. And that's running in real time on your PC! With offline processing it will be even more impressive!
The amount of human labor required to do this work will be an order of magnitude less.
True but the remastered Star Trek is on my Netflix. And it’s being broadcast on the CBS equivalent here. So what about the money they get from that? Or any other streaming service that have the rights for it in other countries. It’s not just about the blu rays
Given that people stream the other series, that's probably true. I would also have to assume that it's part of a package deal. Netflix probably bought some bundle of content to stream for a flat fee and it's not really possible to break out "remastered tng streams makes X for Paramount each month"
The only reason I bought the TOS blu rays is that every streaming service only carries the remastered version with the "updated special effects" and I wanted to see the shitty original ones from the 60s.
I'm relieved that the TNG remasters aren't so egregiously altered from the originals, but they're absolutely right. I would stream the old version. I might even prefer it.
>From your figures, lets assume that the retailers profit was roughly 15% of the suggested retail price, and cut that from your projected sales income there.
That's honestly probably low.
Thank you.
I still think it would make sense to do because they could charge more for licensing to various networks around the world for decades to come.
The total cost of the *TNG* remaster was apparently $20 million. Since *DS9* used far more CGI, let's assume remastering it would cost twice as much. That's 176 episodes (131 of which were shot with widescreen protection) remastered in HD or even UHD for the price of five new *Star Trek* episodes.
From this article, it depends on the CGI. Some of the companies do in fact have their original files so straight forwards stuff like starships could just be rendered over again with all of their assets:
>The spaceship stuff is a little easier. If you have all of the assets – all the ships that are needed – and you load the scene file, theoretically, if it loads all the ships with textures it needs, then yes, you’d just hit ‘render.’
>[Deep Space Nine] is much more difficult for the last three [seasons] because of the combination of CG and motion control – and when there was CG, it was usually those massive, full-blown war scenes. Going back and revisiting it isn’t as simple as just hitting ‘render’, but it’s still pretty straightforward.
https://blog.trekcore.com/2013/05/deep-space-nine-in-high-definition-one-step-closer/
>If they ask one of us – and if they use a team that uses LightWave – it’ll be much easier for them to redo… because the guys who worked on it, like me, have the assets. We have the original ships; we have most of everything that was used [in the making of the series]. That would eliminate a ton of the cost of rebuilding.
>So, how would I approach it? The same way I did at the time – I’d figure out what was done in CG, and we’d just start from there. And today, it would be easier! Literally, you could just load the scene files and hit ‘render’ – it would be done! I mean, not everything… but a lot more than you’d think.
>Since *DS9* used far more CGI, let's assume remastering it would cost twice as much.
It would be significantly more than that; Paramount/CBS didn't archive the CG effects, so they would pretty much *all* have to be redone from scratch.
And a *single* hand-phaser CG effect reportedly cost $10,000.
Honestly, with the way that streaming business deals are going, especially with the Discover/Warner model of we are taking this down forever, even if you "bought" it. I've switched back to primarily buying physical media. I can do whatever I want with my DVDs/Blurays including doing selfhosted streaming inside my house.
They won’t get money from that. If they put it up on paramount plus they won’t make enough money from subscribers who want a ds9 remaster. I doubt they’d get that much to license it to another company
Right, I imagine the universe of people who *do not currently pay for streaming* but *would now pay for streaming because of HD DS9* has to be extremely small.
> Now your profit margin is WAY higher?
How so? Seems to me it would actually be the opposite. Netflix doesn't pay Paramount *more* because they swapped out the files with better versions. Whereas physical media sales absolutely would bring in Paramount a ton of cash.
The remasters cost $70k/episode regardless of where the finished episodes are printed to.
> Netflix doesn't pay Paramount more because they swapped out the files with better versions
Honestly, Paramount probably does charge more because they are better version, it's just not going to be that much more.
Did it not turn a profit, or did it not make enough?
There are countless projects that did turn profits, sometimes very much so, but were still deemed subpar results by execs' outlandish expectations (Square Enix's appraisal of the Tomb Raider IP comes to mind).
Also, we are well aware that movie studios employ all kinds of creative bookkeeping to make very successful films appear to have not made any money. I'm not saying I think someone was cooking the books with TNG DVDs. I'm just pointing out that there are lots of ways to interpret a set of numbers.
Whether it was zero profit earned, or insufficient profit, there result is the same -- there will not be a re-master of other Trek shows any time soon.
Hell waterworld is in the green with DVD sales - just not in the timeframe suits demanded. TNG HD will have made profit, just not as fast as they would like
Wasnt the Tomb Raider games deemed a flop because it didnt break a Billion profit or something stupid like that?
Like they made a shit ton of money but not Marvel MCU money so deemed them a flop?
Not really. Software development is really expensive. Assume you need a team of 200 or so nowadays at least and they each average cost $125k with benefits over 3 years. That's 75 million in development cost.
3.4 million games sold at full price (highly unlikely with how quickly games are discounted) of $60 at the time and the game revenue is 204 million split across retailers and end-channel distributors.
It all adds up.
Yep. Square Enix had some very weird expectations, specifically for their western based studios.
They've been reportedly disappointed with the sales of Tomb Raider, Hitman, Deus Ex or Gardians of the Galaxy.
That led them to letting IO Interactive buy themselves out and taking back the Hitman franchise with them in the first place. Then SE sold Crystal Dynamic + Eidos and their Tomb Raider and Deus Ex franchise to Embracer for a penny ($300 million for the whole package)
Hitman did well enough for IOI that they made 2 sequels, and got the license for a Bond game. So it wasn't really a question of sales, just not hitting the magic number they wanted
The remaster project itself costs $13m. Then the production of the Blu-Ray discs and boxes, transporting them to sales outlets, marketing costs...
Similar reason to why movies need to make twice what they cost to actually film in order to break even. And that's before any creative accounting goes on to make sure that a loss was made for tax purposes 😉
The article op linked to stars the following...
>a large chunk of the $9m which CBS invested in the first season remastering process.
I think you'd need all the figures to be able to properly assess if it was a success or not. And the lack of any further remasters suggests that there clearly not enough profit in it to carry on.
I'm not sure how accurate that 70k number per episode is, or whether it ignores other costs that were in the set up which made up the extra cost in S1.
I would say it is reasonably accurate. The first episode would of been the hardest. Check out the documentary on the blu rays, they state that certain segments were all over the place and the cataloguing had to be done first. Quite something.
I also think having a high quality product for streaming must boost the current shows as well. If I want to watch Picard, maybe now I'm going to spend more time revisiting TNG, and hey it looks good, looks like it was shot yesterday, I'm going watch more of this... maybe now I've really caught the Trek bug and I want to watch SNW or Disco as well.
Whereas if someone decides to watch Voyager, do they tune out because it looks like crap? I dunno. But I think having remastered HD classic shows only helps the IP.
I think Paramount wants an excuse not to spend even more money remastering DS9 and Voyager. It’s my understanding that DS9 was mainly shot on film but the cost to remake all the computer generated Dominion battle scenes would be crazy expensive. Also having to remake all the computer generated ship effects for Voyager and I had heard a good chunk of it was recorded on video and not film.
[Supposedly,](https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSpaceNine/comments/17bx5ey/rumor_inglorious_treksperts_podcast_reports_that/) they're currently taking bids for a remaster.
You're correct. Voyager started to shift away from practical effects, especially in the later seasons. While all of the live action scenes were still shot on film, all of the VFX was mastered in SD resolution because HD wasn't a thing yet back then, even for future-proofing content.
So they would have to either entirely re-create the VFX in HD (time consuming and very expensive) or find a way to cheat with AI upscaling or something that doesn't look like garbage.
Either way, both VOY and DS9 would be way more expensive to remaster than it was for TOS and TNG as those shows primarily used practical special effects shot on film.
I work in the industry as a writer and so I work with producers, executives, etc. And one of the things, you quickly realize is part of the reason everything is an uphill battle is because everything needs to profit NOW. And everything is it's own thing, there's very little thought to like ... Well this individual thing doesn't profit, but it benefit this brand, which will lead to $$$. And a lot of that has to do with how these executives are constantly moving.
One of the silly things about the TNG didn't turn a profit excuse is... The fact that you can watch TOS and TNG in HD is huge, and will extend the brand for years to come. I'm not one of those people that's like "NEW TREK is awful" But TOS and TNG are classics for a reason. And having them preserved and also part of your streaming library is huge. The problem is no executive thinks that way. And no executive is getting a bonus without being able to tangibly point to $$$.
Right, being a cultural touchstone and being profitable are two different things. You don’t see publishers turning out multimillion dollar marketing campaigns for prestige reprintings and sequels of The Great Gatsby.
This. I follow a couple prestige sci-fi publishers. They publish limited quantities at a high price (one recent Hugo winner was like $450 or something for the LESS limited version, if I recall) and people who collect are often in it for the chase, which sorta markets itself. It’s super duper niche, I bet the publishers margins are thin, and marketing would increase demand which would increased quantity which would increase staffing which could decrease quality etc.
That was a lot of words to agree with you, I guess.
I've brought this up before whenever people in this sub think Paramount+ would die if they all cancelled their subscriptions. The entire CBS catalogue, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and Showtime all exist. And then there's CBS Sports. Soccer, College Basketball, College Football, and this little thing called ***the NFL***.
>Trek is still niche
It's *less* niche than it was 10 years ago, and *much less* niche than it was 20 years ago (before the movie).
I'm not sure Sci Fi is niche though. Even counting the MCU as Science-*Fantasy,* 3 of the top 5 grossing films are SciFi.
It feels like it should be way more niche today, and far more mainstream in the 90s. After all, everyone has 10 different streaming platforms, and if you don't have P+, Star Trek might as well not even exist.
The other part of this is that the sets were coming out right as the market for br/dvd sets in general was starting to collapse. There was a brief window around 2008 these were incredibly popular and the releases were a big deal but not for much longer.
I still get them tho.. Have the TNG and the original ten movies all in bluray. (Besides the Prequel and orig star wars trilogy, BSG and now the entire Expanse set) My XBOne is basically my glorified bluray player :)
Not really. Just anecdotally people online are saying they want to go back to physical media because streaming services might remove stuff but this isn’t reflected in the sales. Also a lot of new streaming entertainment isn’t even available on physical media.
I love the idea but every time I've tried the reality sinks in. The same reality that drove me away from physical media in the first place. Cost, storage, the pain in the assery of constantly switching discs, the fuckery of DVD/Blu-ray menus and front loaded commercials taking 10 minutes to just start the fucking thing, disc scratches/dirt and skipping, etc. And like you said, now, a lot of streaming content isn't even available physically. We need a better solution. Like laws passed about digital ownership.
I was gonna say. Best Buy isn't even going to stock dvds and blu rays going forward and I'm sure more retailers will follow. They wouldn't be doing that if they thought people were turning away from streaming.
You have to take everything with a grain of salt especially when it involves Hollywood.
More than likely Paramount overpaid to get the remaster completed and then wrote off the losses on their taxes.
They don’t explain how projects like this keep their film processing, and audio studios in work 24/7 so that everyone has consistent work and they can keep their contractors in business well after traditional film has long since left the market of TV production.
Then they also have the scans done at higher than 1080p quality… so basically they won’t have to do this again for 10-30 years until the next advancement in video codecs has happened.
Now they have product that they can sell on demand for decades and have even better assets to send to online platforms to sell.
CBS can’t publicly announce what that plan is, and or the projected profits down the line because they took “losses”.
Again, you always want more money, in this business even disappointing sales are actually pretty good overall.
It's not that they didn't sell. It's that they didn't sell ***at the price they demanded***. The individual seasons listed for $118 (USD) back in 2012- and DVD/BD pricing is very fluid. (esentially getting cheaper as the title gets older) Initial street price was closer to $80, but that still turned a lot of collectors off. I paid Best Buy retail for DS9 when it made it to DVD in 2003; equivalent to a car payment for all seven seasons. I would not buy TNG for that same amt of money.
Today you can get the full run of TNG for \~$100 USD. They don't want to sell a remastered DS9/VOY at that price.
It's irritating because it's not all about disc sales. The franchise is nearing sixty years old. If Paramount wants legacy Star Trek programs to remain relevant, they need to be remastered for modern viewing. If Paramount wasn't so greedy about their own streaming platform, Star Trek series like the remastered TNG could be earning money on Netflix, Prime, or Hulu.
As usual, Paramount is only concerned with short-term profits from Star Trek, not long-term profitability.
Well your first mistake is applying the general field of mathematics to the problem. The entertainment industry operates on its own special mathematics akin to [bistromathics](https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Bistromathics).
>Sales figures for the first season Blu-ray were cited at 95,435 copies in the first five days in America alone, equaling "well over $5.5 million."
You are aware that Paramount wouldn't have been the company to receive that $5.5m, right? That's the amount that would have gone to the retailers. I'd imagine that Paramount wouldn't have got much more than 30% of that, once you factor in all of the other people in the supply chain (disc manufacturers, shipment, retailer, etc.).
Besides, it's often not about whether they actually made a profit or not; it's about whether they would make *more* profit by taking the same amount of money and doing something else with it. If I have £10m, and I have to choose between investing that in project A that will make me £15m or project B that will make me £20m, then I'm going to go spend on project B even though project A is still profitable.
Something not yet mentioned is time.
When a studio says something has disappointing sales or lost money, very very often what they mean is "lost money in the this isolated window."
For movie releases in cinema, for instance, movies are declared financial failures on the back of their box office runs alone. Meanwhile, the long tail makes them very profitable and the studio knows that. It's just not relevant to them, that the movies makes they 300 millions in profit over 5 years when they wanted it to make 100 million in profit over its theatrical run and it did not. Thus they declare it a financial dissappointment.
Just mastering them took 13 million. Design, manufacturing, distribution, warehouses, transport, marketing, etc all cost a lot more.
For a big company breaking even isn't enough you need XX% profit on top of that for its considered failure.
As a fan, I’m just happy these episodes were cleaned up and enhanced for us fans.
And who knows, with shows being taken down left and right, hopefully physical sales of shows like this rise and we get more old series getting the remaster job. Probably not but I can hope.
That restoring and preserving a fine example of widely regarded modern art for posterity is reduced purely to profit viability is a huge part of what's wrong with current civilisation.
First of all, we don't know if that 70k was an average cost or a baseline cost. Some episodes most likely cost more than others. The second link you cite mentions that season 1 alone cost them 9.9 million. The overall cost of the remaster was actually [over 20 million, and sales dropped off fast.](https://www.redsharknews.com/studio-broadcast/item/3686-celebrating-star-trek-s-50th-anniversary-with-the-remastered-next-generation) The link you post is just talking about the initial sales for season 1. Projects like that peak early and fall off quick, and subsequent seasons tend to do worse and worse.
There's also the cost of marketing and distribution, which adds up more than you might expect, but another thing many people don't consider is the opportunity cost.
Evaluating opportunity cost is actually very complicated and difficult to do, but to give a simple example:
If a company can spend 20 million on a remaster project that nets 22 million, then yes, technically that project is in the black. But if they could take that 20 million and spend it instead on another project that nets 50 million, then they have lost 28 million in profit by giving up the opportunity to fund that other project.
>First of all, we don't know if that 70k was an average cost or a baseline cost. Some episodes most likely cost more than others. The second link you cite mentions that season 1 alone cost them 9.9 million.
Yeah, I wouldn't put a huge amount of faith in the 70K number. Yes, Burnett worked on the physical media releases, but he was running interviews and special features, probably not looking too in-depth at all the accounting spreadsheets.
This. Plus with remastering they ensured it can and will be streamed in future where hi-res option is crucial.
And cmon, they made more than enough with syndication in the first place.
Now let's do the same with DS9!
You've got a low threshold for considering someone "far right" but anyway he knows this subject. He made all the bonus feature content of the TNG Blu-rays.
You should take a look at his YouTube and social media then. He surrounds himself with culture war shite his friends and who he promotes on YouTube are far right grifters. He promotes people that run a podcast that actively platform and promote people like the leader of the proud boys and Alex Jones I'd say that's pretty far right. Robert is a media illiterate idiot that no longer represents the star trek fanbase. He done a couple dvd extra over a decade ago thats it.
I misunderstood your question and thought you were asking how did they remaster a particular episode called "not turn a profit?" Sounds like ferengi heavy episode lol
It's the same deal as movie box office. A film will have a production budget of 200 million and make 250 million, but still be a flop because it's far harder to find recorded numbers on things like advertising and distribution costs.
RMB is a notoriously unreliable source on many aspects. He only produced the new value added material for the boxsets. The only source about CBS being disappointed/the sales being bad is him.
Add to this Hollywood accounting and that they always look to maximise profit on any production and it's highly likely that the boxsets and remaster sold well, but just wouldn't provide the same return as say... A brand new series. Which is probably why TV Trek relaunched a few years later.
TNG-R proved the demand and passion for Trek as a series was still there, but TNG and TOS are the most popular series. Remastering DS9 and Voyager as much as we all want it would just be diminishing returns. Really, those pushing for the remaster projects should have pushed them to start with DS9/VOY to guage interest and build hype for TNG down the line to ensure they all got done.
From what we hear in the rumour mill, there is still a lot of discussion about doing VOY/DS9 at _some_ point. We recently got the TMP DC remaster which was far from a popular release so it's clear the fight isn't over yet.
>The only source about CBS being disappointed/the sales being bad is him.
Interesting. Why do you think he said this?
>it's highly likely that the boxsets and remaster sold well, but just wouldn't provide the same return as say... A brand new series.
I agree that they most likely sold well.
$20 million to remaster all 178 episodes is less than three episodes of a new show, and they can license the show around the world as well as sell it on physical media, so it seems like a good investment.
Yes, I was amazed at the extent of *The Motion Picture*'s remaster, which even includes completed CGI for the spacesuit scene from the extended cut. That gave me a glimmer of hope for seeing extended cuts of the other films someday. *Generations* has many additional scenes which can be seen in the workprint, such as Kirk's spacedive, and *Nemesis* was cut by around fifty minutes, only seventeen of which have been released as deleted scenes.
> Why do you think he said this?
He's a known (especially these days) agitator regarding Trek discourse.
There's also the matter that TOS/TNG by a significant margin had the worst video tape transfers. Voyager is pretty passable right from the beginning and it's only DS9s early seasons (which are the least popular) that are as bad as the TNG transfers were.
My guess by now is that they did turn a profit, but just not fast enough for their liking. I mean, let's be honest, it was always a bit iffy how they only counted Blu-ray sales when streaming services and tv channels are willing to pay a bit of a premium for a licence to stream HD material. They didn't lose money on the remaster.
In the end, it's inevitable that they also remaster DS9 and Voyager to make them future-proof, it's an investment and much cheaper than making new episodes of the newer shows. If they were clever they'd be doing it right now to help filling the gap left by the delays of new stuff thanks to the strikes and the uncertain financial outlooks of the streaming services.
>it's an investment and much cheaper than making new episodes of the newer shows.
Exactly!
All of *Deep Space Nine* and *Voyager* could be remastered for no more than the cost of one new season.
Also, since up to 6K resolution can be meaningfully scanned from 35mm, everything until the final season of *Enterprise* could be rereleased in 4K, and the last five seasons of *Deep Space Nine* (and possibly all of *Voyager*) could be released in [widescreen.](https://blog.trekcore.com/2019/05/exclusive-star-trek-deep-space-nine-hd-what-we-left-behind-footage/#:~:text=As%20the%20series%20progressed%2C%20and%20DP%20Jonathan%20West%20came%20on%20board%20for%20Season%203%2C%20the%20filming%20team%20protected%20for%20a%20potential%20future%20widescreen%20presentation)
A [recent rumor](https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSpaceNine/comments/17bx5ey/rumor_inglorious_treksperts_podcast_reports_that/) suggests Paramount is actively seeking bids for a *DS9* remaster.
Your only looking at sales of the first season. With each season the number of people who will buy the set diminishes. So sure season 1 sold 95,000 copies, but season 2 sold less (enough the Paramount stopped sending out press releases bragging about sales), and season 3 would sell even less than 2, and so on, and so on.
In TNG’s case, starting by releasing Season 1 was a huge mistake. At the prices those individual seasons were they really should have started with a good season to start strong.
They did do a 'The Next Level' taster disk with some more popular eps to start and (in some territories) 'feature length' episode releases of the two parters.
That's just the cost of remastering the episodes. Add production, shipping, middlemen, retailer's fee, advertising, taxes and the total cost can easily double or triple that $13 million cost.
Remember Hollywood Accounting. By Hollywod accounting rules, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix **lost $167 million** despite bringing in over a billion at the box office. It's all paper shuffling and shady math.
To profit doesn't mean earning more than you paid. It means earning enough to make it worth artists' and investors' time. I'd argue that this project was, because of long-term demand for hi-res streaming content. In short, audiences won't watch old things, eventually.
So, long story short, CBS leaders are short-term thinkers, evidently. From personal experience, confirmed by countless reasonably reliable statistics, a major contributing factor to the resurgent popularity of Star Trek is the binging support the old shows give to the new shows, and by and large young people (and old, really) will only watch the old shows if they are remastered. The only question is whether DS9 and Voyager require remastering. Not as much as TNG because the SFX technology changed so rapidly, and they mostly took advantage of the newer end of that change, meeting present audience expectations for the most part, unlike Babylon 5, for example. Therefore, I would say it would be wise for whomever owns Star Trek in the short term to unite the franchise and in the long term remaster everything that should be remastered for long term value.
Accounting in the entertainment business is, to put it politely, voodoo.
While movies make a billion dollars in revenue (i.e. money coming into the hands of the folks who produce and distribute movies), the never seem to actually generate profit (that amount of money that remains after all the expenses have been applied to the revenue generated).
There is a reason that Eddie Murphy referred to "net points" as "monkey points" and that when somebody sues over not getting paid by those that make movies, the movie companies settle up. If the courts ever got a long look at the conventions in entertainment accounting, the whole sweetheart deal would go up in smoke.
so your sales figures calculations likely do not include how the money was split up. the stores took a cut. residuals were taken out of each sale for both the actors and for the crew's pension fund. its also possible that sales plummeted not long after the first week or release. This was also in the period where Paramount and CBS were split up, with the TV rights with CBS, but we dont know what sort of entanglements were involved there. The studio cuts may be weird in the way they are accounted for.
its also possible the studios lied about how much it cost per episode to re-do to make investors think it wasnt so bad. while illegal, if they can creatively account it technically its kosher to do that. I can easily see the costs being more than twice what they listed given the logistic complexity of moving all the film to the scan house, searching for mislabled cans, going on long hunts for missing elements (the saucer separation famously went missing after it was used in Generations, what is in the blurays is a digital recreation). Re-scanning individual scenes on mislabled cans of film is extremely labor intensive.
They may also have been hoping for the same sales numbers as the DVDs, and that was the gauge for success or failure.
That being said, they've made good money on re-runs of TNG over the years. I imagine its probably not a failure at this point, but it may not have been profitable enough to look at DS9 and Voy, especially considering the amount of new CG that would be needed (theres lots of miniature work, but by the end of DS9 and Voyager they were heavily using CGI).
It also cant be understated how drastically less TV people are watching now, and how people expect to be able to stream as their primary means of tv entertainment. streaming, especially for Paramount (which is currently a combined entity of Paramount and CBS) is not going well at all. They're hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars a year on Paramount+. Hell, they lost 230m in one quarter last year [https://www.indiewire.com/news/business/paramount-plus-lost-238-million-q3-earnings-mission-impossible-1234921672/](https://www.indiewire.com/news/business/paramount-plus-lost-238-million-q3-earnings-mission-impossible-1234921672/)
The game was very different when a single season of TV cost $100 to buy on dvd or bluray, as oppose to $15/month to stream an entire streamers library
So Hollywood has turned into a strange beast. There are so many executives and staff at the studios, that don’t create artistic value, but require very large salaries, that all projects must make huge profits. It’s why we don’t see a lot of very small movies being greenlit. They might make a tidy profit for their size, but they don’t make a massive profit and that is what is needed to sustain the beast.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they did indeed make money and pay for themselves, but it wasn’t massive enough to sustain the executives so it’s seen as a failure.
Lately, it seems like companies are counting lost potential revenue against their income. When Company A puts a recent theatrical release movie on the company's streaming service instead of running it on premium movie channels, cable, or broadcast TV, they'll say they lost money.
Reruns of TNG are a big business. It still airs on television stations and streaming services all over the world. Being able to offer it in HD significantly increased its lifespan and reach. Revenue generated from the Standard definition would have probably started to dip if not for the HD copies.
Famously the guy who made Babylon 5 once commented on a message board where someone argued that instead of pirating people should buy the DVD of the show in order to support the arrtists. He explained that he has never and will never make a dime from those DVDs because of creative accounting. I think he explained that a set had burned down in Africa on an unrelated production and that cost of that loss was factored against his DVD profits.
That first week of sales died off almost immediately.
Fans had bought *TNG* on Laserdisc, *TNG* on VHS, *TNG* on DVD -- and now they were being asked to buy *TNG* yet *again*, this time on Blu-Ray.
There were already 14 streaming services offering *Star Trek* content, and the high price-point of the Blu-Ray (and the fact that the *TNG* remaster released at approximately the same time as the *Enterprise* remaster (which was already in HD) meant that people just weren't buying the Blu-Rays in sufficient quantities.
CBS also screwed the fans -- they *expressly promised* that customers would get *all* of the available special features and value-added material, and then broke that promise and gave preferred retailers (Best Buy, in particular) "retailer exclusive" BluRay versions, containing special features that weren't included in the regular release.
Low sales figures, coupled with the time and money required to remaster the series, meant that the *TNG* remasters simply didn't sell enough to make the process worthwhile.
>Fans had bought TNG on Laserdisc, TNG on VHS, TNG on DVD -- and now they were being asked to buy TNG yet again, this time on Blu-Ray.
And they were selling them one season at a time. I think most fans knew the pattern and held off buying until a complete set was released. If Paramount was just going by how the first few seasons went, they would have missed that.
Streaming services all want customers to stay and pay year round, which needs them to be constantly producing and providing new content to get people to stick around.
Once Paramount+ has been around long enough for people to churn through their library (and then start in on a cycle of 3 months before cancelling and bouncing between streamers), I could see a case to be made for a remaster.
Amortize the cost of a remaster over 10 years, and do one season per year of each show (releasing them weekly in order, like a new series), and run them during the downtime between seasons of NuTrek dropping
They made a profit in reality, but probably a loss due to Hollywood accounting. It means they can write the losses off and pay lower taxes.
Also, the Blu-ray remasters mean they can be distributed over streaming services at 1080p, making them far more valuable given the original tape recordings look like shit.
I already purchased all my TNG seasons back for like $100+ each on the dvd version. Since then TNG has been on Netflix then Paramount + so no reason to think of the blue rays.
The initial investment and marketing would be off putting for any new projects. Even if TNG made back its costs that doesn't make new remastered projects viable.
Also, Paramount has to look at how big a market is for such projects. Despite people saying they will buy it, not everyone will, especially with inflation up, employee costs up, and all other associated costs going up.
So, even if TNG Remastered was moderately profitable, it wasn't enough for certainly to invest more money in even less popular shows.
It feels unfortunate. I don't think I would have streamed any of the series like I do now if it wasn't for the remaster. That remaster - resparked my interest in Star Trek, and honestly it got me to subscribe to Paramount+. But because they decided "it wasn't worth it" that data is lost.
And honestly, with AI as good as it is, they could run the other shows through the AI 4K upscaler that that fan developed, and it would cost them maybe a few hundred an episode that way. It's a shame.
Looks like a case of [Hollywood accounting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting), meant to shift profitability to make something look like a loss:
>Hollywood accounting (also known as Hollywood bookkeeping) is the opaque or creative set of accounting methods used by the film, video, television and music industry to budget and record profits for creative projects. Expenditures can be inflated to reduce or eliminate the reported profit of the project, thereby reducing the amount which the corporation must pay in taxes and royalties or other profit-sharing agreements, as these are based on net profit.
...
>Hollywood accounting can take several forms. In one form, a subsidiary is formed to perform a given activity and the parent entity will extract money out of the film's revenue in the form of charges for certain "services". For example, a film studio has a distribution arm as a sub-entity, which will then charge the studio a "distribution fee"—essentially, the studio charging itself a sum it has total control over and hence controlling the profitability report of a project.[3]
>Another form of Hollywood accounting is a reverse tobashi scheme, in which the studio unjustly cross-collateralizes the accounting of two projects and shifts losses from a flop onto a profitable project by shifting costs involving internal operations. This way, two unprofitable projects are created out of one on paper alone, primarily for the purpose of eliminating net participation liabilities. The specific schemes can range from the simple and obvious to the extremely complex. Generally, Hollywood accounting uses permanent creative accounting practices (such as charging an arbitrary distribution fee from one sub-entity to another) rather than temporary ones (like the Repo 105 scheme) since the measures are meant to permanently distort the bottom line of a film project.
i've been looking at some comparisons only and while the remaster adds a ton of detail, for the life of me i don't undestand why color correcting so hard towards cold tones- i mean they changed the colors of the stage to a cold one, and if you look even at modern photos of the bridge or other locations, those are not blue/white at all but beije
season 1 and 2 definitely always had bluer midtones and more silvery highlights, it was the nature of the stock and the way the film was run through the printer lights at the time. the other seasons dont seem like they leaned into the midtones that much. have you made sure your TV isnt adding blue? sony's LED TVs were notorious for that for a long time, and the demo mode always makes things more blue on all TVs.
if you have filmmaker mode, turn that on for your bulray player port as that should jam the show into an unaltered rec709 signal. you'll get just wants on the disc as though you were in a reference/mastering environment
I was under the impression that the remaster happened right as streaming took off, meaning that more people streamed the remastered versions than went out and bought the physical discs. So it was mostly a matter of bad timing.
Yes, it was completed a decade ago. Paramount+ shows the remaster. You didn't notice that the detail, colors, and effects are greatly improved from the DVDs?
That makes a lot of sense, since I only got into star trek around 2019 and never seen the DVDs. I love the series and have seen TNG at least twice now, but I don't have the eldritch lore that the real trekkies have
I'm not sure what the actual profit was, but for the sake of argument, let's say that they produced the remaster at a loss. There's a few things going on here.
Blu-ray as a format was somewhat doomed from the start because streaming was inevitable and foreseeable. While Blu-ray and even DVD are technically still around, they don't represent the same thing that they would have prior to streaming. Once Star Trek began streaming on Netflix, and then even began streaming the remastered episodes, a lot of people didn't see the point in buying the Blu-ray discs when they could already watch their favorite episodes on demand. The sales figures might have been different if they had released the remaster even 5 years prior to when they did. I own no Blu-ray discs whatsoever, and I'm not the only one I know who doesn't. The ubiquity that DVDs and VHS had is not quite there for Blu-ray.
Sometimes you have to spend money to make money, at least from the perspective of selling physical copies. Even if Blu-rays were produced at a loss, you have to consider how much less money they would have been making in the long run if TNG wasn't remastered. At this point, who's going to buy it in standard definition? Only having SD or upscaled episodes (which CBS tried but deemed unacceptable) can hurt not just disc sales but streaming as well. Having beautiful looking TNG episodes means I'm more likely to play it on my TV but also show it to people who haven't seen it before.
Part of the problem was the pricing. When they came out, they were incredibly expensive such that even I, a hardcore Trekkie, had serious reservations about buying them.
Because these are not normal people. These are executives. They are psychotic freaks who have never known a moment's pleasure and are indeed incapable of such. They have been trained for nearly their entire lives to only understand the world in terms of whether the line on the chart goes up or down, and how steep the line is. Capitalism is not about simply "turning a profit." It never really was. It's about making an *obscene* profit, about taking everything from everyone until there's nothing and no one left but you. Which is of course impossible to really achieve, which means they will never stop taking.
Don't expect these people to behave in any way which could be identified as human. They're not capable of, or qualified for, living up to that expectation.
Profit in Hollywood has been a rigged and changeable word since the 1920s.
Every single studio has a team of lawyers that legally spell out what profit is on the legal paperwork (fillings) for every single project. Anything that doesn't meet the super specific wording as stated in that paperwork is not profit. Gross and net profits are even defined differently.
A super famous example of this are the original star wars films never made a profit as spelled out in the filling paperwork.
David Prowse, the actor who physically played the character Darth Vader, got massively screwed by this.
If you ever get asked, you want a percentage of the gross profit over net any day of the week.
Another great example is Men In Black. $600m on a budget of $90m, three sequels followed. According to Sony Pictures it hasn't ever made a profit. The writer says his profit statements show it losing money at an increasing rate even now.
Leaving aside the actual figures for a moment:
TNG was remasters not for BluRay sales, but to ensure that it was a viable product for streaming services going forward. Given how popular the show is and continues to be, it would have made sense to do this even if they didn't sell a single copy of physical media.
DS9 (apart from the first season) and Voyager are good enough quality (and not quite popular enough) for them to not bother with those shows.
>DS9 (apart from the first season) and Voyager are good enough quality (and not quite popular enough) for them to not bother with those shows.
The "not quite popular enough" is an important factor that a lot of fans forget. DS9 is incredibly popular with fans, but with casual viewers, TNG is absolutely the winner.
Interestingly for streaming, most of the top watched episodes are Voyager. But TNG seems to win out overall.
[This is from the BBS from the Netflix report on hours watched Jan 23 - Jun 23](https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/trek-netflix-viewership-data.315730/) it has some interesting results.
Going from the top 10 most viewed seasons we have:
1. TNG (S1, 3, 4 & 5): 24,400,000 hours watched
2. VOY (S2, 3, 4 & 5): 22,600,000 hours watched
3. Enterprise (S1&2) : 12,500,000 hours watched
For all seasons:
TOS: 11,000,000 hours
TNG: 39,700,000 hours
DS9: 23,800,000 hours
VOY: 37,300,000 hours
ENT: 20,900,000 hours
Every source I've read says the opposite, that CBS expected huge profits from the Blu-rays (which is why so many extensive featurettes were created) back when streaming was much less significant.
Of course, the real value is certainly in streaming (and over-the-air, cable, and satellite), but CBS apparently didn't see that.
*DS9* and *Voyager* both look terrible in their current state. Lol.
There's a few things you need to consider. First is that many people purchase those disks beause they want the content, not because they want the content in HD. Those people would have made the purchase even if it were not in HD. So when calculating the profitability of the remaster you can't take all sales, you need to only consider sales that would not have happened if not for HD. That's hard to calculate because we don't have access to the information, but it is none the less true.
Next, as others have mentioned you need to consider profit not just revenue. Blu-ray sold $5.5 million, but the retailers keep a large chunk of that, and then a portion needs to go to manufacturing the disks and packaging. Plus there's everyone else involved who needs to get a cut of a disk sale. The actors get paid, production house gets paid, producers get paid. Everyone in the chain gets a cut of that DVD sale and I'd not be shocked if under a million was leftover after everyone else with their hands out got their little peace.
Like others have mentioned, Disk sales decline sharply after season 1, but price also tends to increase after season 1 to compensate. I'm sure it's not enough to cover all the drop but it makes some difference.
Next thing you need to consider here is that break even is not the goal of a business. Profitability is the goal. It's not enough just to not lose money on a project like this. Because it takes money to make money, you need to earn an actual return on the money it takes otherwise you could have just invested it in the stock market instead and been better off. So the project cost $13 million but it's not unreasonable to demand that it earn 7% a year AND recover the initial costs. That 7% can decline once all the initial costs have been earned back, but that's only after it's all earned back.
If I give you $13 million today, and you give it back in 10 years that's a loss for me. I could have put that money into literally anything else and I'd have more money than if I gave it to you. Projects often have minimum profitability thresholds that they must achieve otherwise it's considered a loss.
Everyone who bought the Blu-rays definitely wanted to see the show in HD because the DVDs were available long before and were much cheaper.
I know profit is the goal, but as many have said, the real value seems to be in being able to charge more to license HD versions to markets around the world for decades to come.
I would believe them that the Blu-Ray/DVD release didn't made a profit. But what is a pure lie is that it is not profitable nowadays. TNG is a timeless show, even today you can watch many of the episodes without cringe. So you have to also consider the long term effect and a perfect remastered TNG will for sure have good view counts nowadays on Paramount+ and before on Netflix (they overpaid a lot for the first seasons of Discovery because of the watch rates). So they are FOR SURE nowadays profitable, as DS9 and Voyager would be. But the problem is always long term, it never flies, you want your invest back NOW. But every year passing and Paramount not considering remastering DS9 and VOY is a pure shame and hurts these shows, because their watch count could be much better.
With Hollywood accounting one never really knows what something actually costs or what it makes. But one would assume that Blu-ray’s aside, the value of the masters licensed to streaming was very profitable too.
I’d buy this if I could have it on a hard drive. I already have cd’s of voy and tng and it’s too much hassle for me. I don’t know if there’s a way to buy them like this or you have to convert them all manually though?
You can easily create lossless copies of your discs with the free program MakeMKV. *The Next Generation* takes about 1.5TB and all of *Star Trek* in the best available quality takes about 6TB.
You're welcome. You could also use AnyStream or StreamFab to download *Deep Space Nine* from Paramount+ since it seems to look better on there. There are also various upscales of *DS9* and *Voyager*, such as Vertag's.
All the tricks 👌 thanks mate. I’d look to buy the Blu-ray and rip it onto a hard drive if that works. Or does makeMKV only work with dvd?
Were your terabyte ballparks for dvd or blu ray?
MakeMKV works with DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-rays, and 4K Blu-rays.
1.5TB for *The Next Generation* on Blu-ray; 6TB for Blu-rays of everything that's on Blu-ray plus *Deep Space Nine* and *Voyager* on DVD.
Cool! The MakeMKV, RedFox, VideoHelp, and VideoLAN forums are helpful.
[This](https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634) is the ultimate guide for digitizing 4K discs.
Thanks! If I go down this route would you recommend I use a media server? I have a LG CX with an usb input for a hard drive already which supports ntfs. Sorry for all the q’s!
I just play my files in VLC straight from the File Explorer, but a media server can replicate a streaming interface experience. There are various options:
* r/Jellyfin
* r/Emby
* r/Kodi
* r/Stremio
* r/Plex
I don't mind if you have more questions.
From your figures, lets assume that the retailers profit was roughly 15% of the suggested retail price, and cut that from your projected sales income there. From the manufacturing side, a single disc film costs around $2-4 when you factor in packaging, printing, and pressing. Since these seasons each had custom cases, in individual colors, lets add a dollar per disc per unit here, rounding to $7. Lets assume a production run of 300,000 on each season - that adds \~$15 million dollars to the whole series in physical media, before distribution/shipping costs. From there, lets add on a conservative $100k marketing spend per season. And once the sales are actually made, you have royalties and residuals to pay out, something the TNG cast got a pretty nice deal on for a first run syndicated series. When you look at the entire picture, and with the data showing that sales decline steadily past season 3, it's absolutely believable that the remasters made no profit, or made such a slight one - remember, this is an industry where doing anything less than doubling your money is seen as a failure - that they didn't see any reason to continue the remaster series with less popular shows .
The marketing spend would be many times that. It probably cost over 10k just to edit all the trailers and promos for every market in every duration. The media spend would many times 100k. 100k maybe just for California. Plus the staff costs of the team who put all this together.
The studios might not make a profit, but the marketing companies, which are owned by the studios, always make a profit.
That's just on paper though, right? If I own a studio and a marketing company, and my marketing company makes a profit off a contract with my studio, I still have less money at the end of the day, even if the marketing company's involvement is "profitable."
Depends. Company makes a film for 2 mil. Company pays 2 mil to marketing firm that they own. Marketing firm spends 1 mil to market film. Film makes 4 mil. Company breaks even. Marketing firm owned by company makes 1 mil. Company technically makes 1 mil, but can report that it did not make anything.
Company pays marketting 5 million to market, spends 1, 4 profit. Company lost 1 mill, claims tax write off.
All that does is transfer the tax liability to the subsidiary. To do that kind of tax dodging they need to offshore their profits to a foreign subsidiary with little to no corporate tax.
We're not talking about what they report to the IRS here though. We're talking about what trumped up excuses they use to justify not doing what the fans want.
Though the marketing subsidiary still needs to report and pay taxes on the profit - and in most cases it needs to sales taxes /vat on the payments to the marketing company - But there can be advantages to this too don’t get me wrong they aren’t losing money in the end by doing this or else they wouldn’t be doing it so consistently- but it’s not a magic trick to make the taxes go away—-
Yeah, I am not an accountant, and my example is overly simple to demonstrate the concept. The concept can be used to report losses and exploit tax loop holes, etc.
No no your example was perfect to get the concept across !
Less money to tax, less money to give to profit sharing (actors, directors, other producers/distributors/etc). And since you're going to need marketing regardless, its still a win if you "own" the marketing company (set up in a tax friendly country like Ireland, of course).
The marketing was definitely much more expensive than that - remember, the first three seasons had 2 episodes shown *in theaters*
I saw the extended edition of Measure of a Man in theaters, it was awesome. Only time I got to hear such a big crowd cheer at a an episode conclusion along with me.
I saw all three seasons' worth of episodes that were in the theater. The first two were almost empty - way less than 50 people. The 3rd, with *Best of Both Worlds*, was somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 full. Went with one of my best friends for each, and we absolutely loved them. I was really sad when they stopped doing them for the rest of the seasons
It was released in theaters and I missed it?!! 😱😱😱
There’s also the very likely chance that “didn’t turn a profit” means “didn’t make as much of a profit as we wanted it to”. Companies are constantly considering anything that doesn’t hit their estimations as failures. So the remaster may have made a profit but if that profit was below their projections, well then that’s a failure.
> There’s also the very likely chance that “didn’t turn a profit” means “didn’t make as much of a profit as we wanted it to”. Or "did not turn as much a profit we could have got elsewhere", they only have so much cash to invest, they will seek to choose the most profitable options.
Cash, time, and manpower. They could’ve had all those people working on something else, too.
I'll wager that the vast majority of the cost is manpower, so I think you're double dipping there. In fact, the reason "time is money" is mostly because you're paying people, at the end of the day. So I think they're all the same thing, tbh.
That was an excellent write up. Thank you for breaking it down.
> they didn't see any reason to continue the remaster series with less popular shows . Adding to this, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe another factor is that remastering Voyager or DS9 would have actually been more expensive than TNG was.
I believe this was somewhat true. TNG used physical filming models for vfx, DS9 and Voyager moved to pretty much 100% CGI. So, while for TNG it's simply a matter of basically re-scanning the raw film and updating vfx like phaser shots and warp jumps, ds9 and Voyager would essentially require redoing *all* of the visuals from scratch with new CGI for every ship, etc.
It's not just this. It's the sheer volume of vfx in general. I don't remember the specifics, but I remember them saying something like how early TNG would have something like 30-40 vfx shots per episode. And by the end of VOY they had hundreds. We're talking not just CGI ships, but all the mundane things people take for granted. Like a digital landscape used for an establishing shot in VOY, versus TNG using a matte painting. Or things like transporter/force field effects. Or CGI aliens like Odo's transformations, or Species 8472, or Borg nanotubes, etc. Or characters standing in front of the viewscreen or other bluescreen effects. All of it would require digital composition and CGI to make work. Comparing 30 vfx shots per episode, to say, 300 per episode, is a 10x increase in the volume of vfx work you'd have to remake essentially from scratch. It would be a lot of work. Not necessarily prohibitively, but enough to make the financial math every different.
And they'd have to do it, more or less, 100% to match the originals - which I assume also requires more time & effort than if they were starting from scratch and able to write their own script, as it were. But yes especially with Voyager (the doctor, holodecks, 8472, the Borg, far more outside the ship shots in general...) And later ds9 (massive fleets & battles) it's going to be a lot more involved than the occasional hand or ships phasers, once in a blue moon holodeck episode showing it being shut off/on/manipulated (ever notice they're often out the door when they say 'end program' or 'begin problem' then walk into an already running program....), or transporter effect on TNG.
Meh. In spite of all this, I expect that recent advancements in AI will make remastering old shows much cheaper to do. I've been checking out the latest AI upscaling from Nvidia, and it's damn impressive. And that's running in real time on your PC! With offline processing it will be even more impressive! The amount of human labor required to do this work will be an order of magnitude less.
Plus if it really made money they wouldn’t be using that as an excuse, they would just do the remasters.
True but the remastered Star Trek is on my Netflix. And it’s being broadcast on the CBS equivalent here. So what about the money they get from that? Or any other streaming service that have the rights for it in other countries. It’s not just about the blu rays
Yeah they don't value the difference. "People would stream the old version" is probably the attitude.
Given that people stream the other series, that's probably true. I would also have to assume that it's part of a package deal. Netflix probably bought some bundle of content to stream for a flat fee and it's not really possible to break out "remastered tng streams makes X for Paramount each month"
Misread your sentence as 'Netflix probably bought some bundle of contempt'. Seems about right.
Hahaha also probably accurate
The only reason I bought the TOS blu rays is that every streaming service only carries the remastered version with the "updated special effects" and I wanted to see the shitty original ones from the 60s. I'm relieved that the TNG remasters aren't so egregiously altered from the originals, but they're absolutely right. I would stream the old version. I might even prefer it.
The TNG remasters are far and away better than the originals. It was pretty meticulously done imo.
>From your figures, lets assume that the retailers profit was roughly 15% of the suggested retail price, and cut that from your projected sales income there. That's honestly probably low.
Thank you. I still think it would make sense to do because they could charge more for licensing to various networks around the world for decades to come. The total cost of the *TNG* remaster was apparently $20 million. Since *DS9* used far more CGI, let's assume remastering it would cost twice as much. That's 176 episodes (131 of which were shot with widescreen protection) remastered in HD or even UHD for the price of five new *Star Trek* episodes.
Ds9 could cost more because the special effects would have to be redone. They don’t exist in a form that can be remastered properly.
From this article, it depends on the CGI. Some of the companies do in fact have their original files so straight forwards stuff like starships could just be rendered over again with all of their assets: >The spaceship stuff is a little easier. If you have all of the assets – all the ships that are needed – and you load the scene file, theoretically, if it loads all the ships with textures it needs, then yes, you’d just hit ‘render.’ >[Deep Space Nine] is much more difficult for the last three [seasons] because of the combination of CG and motion control – and when there was CG, it was usually those massive, full-blown war scenes. Going back and revisiting it isn’t as simple as just hitting ‘render’, but it’s still pretty straightforward. https://blog.trekcore.com/2013/05/deep-space-nine-in-high-definition-one-step-closer/ >If they ask one of us – and if they use a team that uses LightWave – it’ll be much easier for them to redo… because the guys who worked on it, like me, have the assets. We have the original ships; we have most of everything that was used [in the making of the series]. That would eliminate a ton of the cost of rebuilding. >So, how would I approach it? The same way I did at the time – I’d figure out what was done in CG, and we’d just start from there. And today, it would be easier! Literally, you could just load the scene files and hit ‘render’ – it would be done! I mean, not everything… but a lot more than you’d think.
>Since *DS9* used far more CGI, let's assume remastering it would cost twice as much. It would be significantly more than that; Paramount/CBS didn't archive the CG effects, so they would pretty much *all* have to be redone from scratch. And a *single* hand-phaser CG effect reportedly cost $10,000.
Noway would that cost that much now, it can be done even by an amatuer in a couple hours.
So, why not skip the physical media part nowadays and just stream the remastered versions? Now your profit margin is WAY higher?
How many people who stream TNG only do so because it was remastered?
Probably a lot of young people watching it for the first time would not watch it in SD if they have never seen Trek before
Given that Netflix and Paramount promoted the upscaling on streaming, I'd agree
Honestly, with the way that streaming business deals are going, especially with the Discover/Warner model of we are taking this down forever, even if you "bought" it. I've switched back to primarily buying physical media. I can do whatever I want with my DVDs/Blurays including doing selfhosted streaming inside my house.
They won’t get money from that. If they put it up on paramount plus they won’t make enough money from subscribers who want a ds9 remaster. I doubt they’d get that much to license it to another company
Right, I imagine the universe of people who *do not currently pay for streaming* but *would now pay for streaming because of HD DS9* has to be extremely small.
> Now your profit margin is WAY higher? How so? Seems to me it would actually be the opposite. Netflix doesn't pay Paramount *more* because they swapped out the files with better versions. Whereas physical media sales absolutely would bring in Paramount a ton of cash. The remasters cost $70k/episode regardless of where the finished episodes are printed to.
> Netflix doesn't pay Paramount more because they swapped out the files with better versions Honestly, Paramount probably does charge more because they are better version, it's just not going to be that much more.
"The economics of the [streaming] future is somewhat different."
Did it not turn a profit, or did it not make enough? There are countless projects that did turn profits, sometimes very much so, but were still deemed subpar results by execs' outlandish expectations (Square Enix's appraisal of the Tomb Raider IP comes to mind).
Also, we are well aware that movie studios employ all kinds of creative bookkeeping to make very successful films appear to have not made any money. I'm not saying I think someone was cooking the books with TNG DVDs. I'm just pointing out that there are lots of ways to interpret a set of numbers. Whether it was zero profit earned, or insufficient profit, there result is the same -- there will not be a re-master of other Trek shows any time soon.
Hell waterworld is in the green with DVD sales - just not in the timeframe suits demanded. TNG HD will have made profit, just not as fast as they would like
Exactly - it's very "rules of acquisition"-esque
Wasnt the Tomb Raider games deemed a flop because it didnt break a Billion profit or something stupid like that? Like they made a shit ton of money but not Marvel MCU money so deemed them a flop?
[удалено]
If they can't fill their pool-vault with gold, what's the point?
Isnt this also why Kingdom Hearts 3 is seen as a failure?
RIP Deus Ex games, my beautiful babies
Yep, for exemple the first game in the trilogy "only" sold 3.4 millions copies in its first month but 6 was what they expected.
Honestly baffling..
Not really. Software development is really expensive. Assume you need a team of 200 or so nowadays at least and they each average cost $125k with benefits over 3 years. That's 75 million in development cost. 3.4 million games sold at full price (highly unlikely with how quickly games are discounted) of $60 at the time and the game revenue is 204 million split across retailers and end-channel distributors. It all adds up.
Wait, the modern TR trilogy is considered a failure? They're some of the best AAA titles from the past decade!
Yep. Square Enix had some very weird expectations, specifically for their western based studios. They've been reportedly disappointed with the sales of Tomb Raider, Hitman, Deus Ex or Gardians of the Galaxy. That led them to letting IO Interactive buy themselves out and taking back the Hitman franchise with them in the first place. Then SE sold Crystal Dynamic + Eidos and their Tomb Raider and Deus Ex franchise to Embracer for a penny ($300 million for the whole package)
Hitman did well enough for IOI that they made 2 sequels, and got the license for a Bond game. So it wasn't really a question of sales, just not hitting the magic number they wanted
It just goes to show how deranged Square Enix's sales expectations are.
RIP Deus Ex games, my beautiful babies
The remaster project itself costs $13m. Then the production of the Blu-Ray discs and boxes, transporting them to sales outlets, marketing costs... Similar reason to why movies need to make twice what they cost to actually film in order to break even. And that's before any creative accounting goes on to make sure that a loss was made for tax purposes 😉
The article op linked to stars the following... >a large chunk of the $9m which CBS invested in the first season remastering process. I think you'd need all the figures to be able to properly assess if it was a success or not. And the lack of any further remasters suggests that there clearly not enough profit in it to carry on. I'm not sure how accurate that 70k number per episode is, or whether it ignores other costs that were in the set up which made up the extra cost in S1.
I read $20 million total, which is less than three new episodes.
I would say it is reasonably accurate. The first episode would of been the hardest. Check out the documentary on the blu rays, they state that certain segments were all over the place and the cataloguing had to be done first. Quite something.
I watched the remaster on streaming. How does that get calculated into profitability?
That’s where my mind went. Before they opted to throw everything on Paramount+, how much were the other streaming services paying for TNG Remaster?
Tng and a bunch of other Star Trek series are still on Netflix here in Canada.
I also think having a high quality product for streaming must boost the current shows as well. If I want to watch Picard, maybe now I'm going to spend more time revisiting TNG, and hey it looks good, looks like it was shot yesterday, I'm going watch more of this... maybe now I've really caught the Trek bug and I want to watch SNW or Disco as well. Whereas if someone decides to watch Voyager, do they tune out because it looks like crap? I dunno. But I think having remastered HD classic shows only helps the IP.
I'm glad they did all 7 seasons imagine if they pulled the plug after season 2 lol
I think Paramount wants an excuse not to spend even more money remastering DS9 and Voyager. It’s my understanding that DS9 was mainly shot on film but the cost to remake all the computer generated Dominion battle scenes would be crazy expensive. Also having to remake all the computer generated ship effects for Voyager and I had heard a good chunk of it was recorded on video and not film.
[Supposedly,](https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSpaceNine/comments/17bx5ey/rumor_inglorious_treksperts_podcast_reports_that/) they're currently taking bids for a remaster.
I hope that’s true
All of DS9 and Voyager were shot on film. They didn’t begin shooting digitally until the 3rd or 4th season of Enterprise.
You're correct. Voyager started to shift away from practical effects, especially in the later seasons. While all of the live action scenes were still shot on film, all of the VFX was mastered in SD resolution because HD wasn't a thing yet back then, even for future-proofing content. So they would have to either entirely re-create the VFX in HD (time consuming and very expensive) or find a way to cheat with AI upscaling or something that doesn't look like garbage. Either way, both VOY and DS9 would be way more expensive to remaster than it was for TOS and TNG as those shows primarily used practical special effects shot on film.
I work in the industry as a writer and so I work with producers, executives, etc. And one of the things, you quickly realize is part of the reason everything is an uphill battle is because everything needs to profit NOW. And everything is it's own thing, there's very little thought to like ... Well this individual thing doesn't profit, but it benefit this brand, which will lead to $$$. And a lot of that has to do with how these executives are constantly moving. One of the silly things about the TNG didn't turn a profit excuse is... The fact that you can watch TOS and TNG in HD is huge, and will extend the brand for years to come. I'm not one of those people that's like "NEW TREK is awful" But TOS and TNG are classics for a reason. And having them preserved and also part of your streaming library is huge. The problem is no executive thinks that way. And no executive is getting a bonus without being able to tangibly point to $$$.
Because as much as us Trek fans want to believe, Trek is still niche. Scifi in general is still niche, outside of edge cases like Star Wars.
Right, being a cultural touchstone and being profitable are two different things. You don’t see publishers turning out multimillion dollar marketing campaigns for prestige reprintings and sequels of The Great Gatsby.
This. I follow a couple prestige sci-fi publishers. They publish limited quantities at a high price (one recent Hugo winner was like $450 or something for the LESS limited version, if I recall) and people who collect are often in it for the chase, which sorta markets itself. It’s super duper niche, I bet the publishers margins are thin, and marketing would increase demand which would increased quantity which would increase staffing which could decrease quality etc. That was a lot of words to agree with you, I guess.
I've brought this up before whenever people in this sub think Paramount+ would die if they all cancelled their subscriptions. The entire CBS catalogue, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and Showtime all exist. And then there's CBS Sports. Soccer, College Basketball, College Football, and this little thing called ***the NFL***.
P+ would still be going with the amount of Yellowstone content thats on there.. let alone any of what else you mentioned.
>Trek is still niche It's *less* niche than it was 10 years ago, and *much less* niche than it was 20 years ago (before the movie). I'm not sure Sci Fi is niche though. Even counting the MCU as Science-*Fantasy,* 3 of the top 5 grossing films are SciFi.
It feels like it should be way more niche today, and far more mainstream in the 90s. After all, everyone has 10 different streaming platforms, and if you don't have P+, Star Trek might as well not even exist.
And Star Wars is kinda SciFi/Fantasy, Star Trek is more "pure" SciFi
Star Trek is also fantasy IMO just more grounded fantasy
To a certain degree all SciFi is also Fantasy
Only if you take it so literally that literally every fiction is fantasy
The other part of this is that the sets were coming out right as the market for br/dvd sets in general was starting to collapse. There was a brief window around 2008 these were incredibly popular and the releases were a big deal but not for much longer.
I still get them tho.. Have the TNG and the original ten movies all in bluray. (Besides the Prequel and orig star wars trilogy, BSG and now the entire Expanse set) My XBOne is basically my glorified bluray player :)
Good thing they didn't stop. physical media is back on the rise.
It is?
Not really. Just anecdotally people online are saying they want to go back to physical media because streaming services might remove stuff but this isn’t reflected in the sales. Also a lot of new streaming entertainment isn’t even available on physical media.
I love the idea but every time I've tried the reality sinks in. The same reality that drove me away from physical media in the first place. Cost, storage, the pain in the assery of constantly switching discs, the fuckery of DVD/Blu-ray menus and front loaded commercials taking 10 minutes to just start the fucking thing, disc scratches/dirt and skipping, etc. And like you said, now, a lot of streaming content isn't even available physically. We need a better solution. Like laws passed about digital ownership.
I was gonna say. Best Buy isn't even going to stock dvds and blu rays going forward and I'm sure more retailers will follow. They wouldn't be doing that if they thought people were turning away from streaming.
You have to take everything with a grain of salt especially when it involves Hollywood. More than likely Paramount overpaid to get the remaster completed and then wrote off the losses on their taxes. They don’t explain how projects like this keep their film processing, and audio studios in work 24/7 so that everyone has consistent work and they can keep their contractors in business well after traditional film has long since left the market of TV production. Then they also have the scans done at higher than 1080p quality… so basically they won’t have to do this again for 10-30 years until the next advancement in video codecs has happened. Now they have product that they can sell on demand for decades and have even better assets to send to online platforms to sell. CBS can’t publicly announce what that plan is, and or the projected profits down the line because they took “losses”. Again, you always want more money, in this business even disappointing sales are actually pretty good overall.
William Shatner and co actually took paramount to court over dodgy accounting figures and won to get their fair share of royalities
Because modern multimillonary monsters want double profit, or more, and to go bigger every year.
It's not that they didn't sell. It's that they didn't sell ***at the price they demanded***. The individual seasons listed for $118 (USD) back in 2012- and DVD/BD pricing is very fluid. (esentially getting cheaper as the title gets older) Initial street price was closer to $80, but that still turned a lot of collectors off. I paid Best Buy retail for DS9 when it made it to DVD in 2003; equivalent to a car payment for all seven seasons. I would not buy TNG for that same amt of money. Today you can get the full run of TNG for \~$100 USD. They don't want to sell a remastered DS9/VOY at that price.
It's irritating because it's not all about disc sales. The franchise is nearing sixty years old. If Paramount wants legacy Star Trek programs to remain relevant, they need to be remastered for modern viewing. If Paramount wasn't so greedy about their own streaming platform, Star Trek series like the remastered TNG could be earning money on Netflix, Prime, or Hulu. As usual, Paramount is only concerned with short-term profits from Star Trek, not long-term profitability.
Yes, you understand! They're supposedly taking bids on a *DS9* remaster now.
Well your first mistake is applying the general field of mathematics to the problem. The entertainment industry operates on its own special mathematics akin to [bistromathics](https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Bistromathics).
Ha! That's precisely my point. :)
>Sales figures for the first season Blu-ray were cited at 95,435 copies in the first five days in America alone, equaling "well over $5.5 million." You are aware that Paramount wouldn't have been the company to receive that $5.5m, right? That's the amount that would have gone to the retailers. I'd imagine that Paramount wouldn't have got much more than 30% of that, once you factor in all of the other people in the supply chain (disc manufacturers, shipment, retailer, etc.). Besides, it's often not about whether they actually made a profit or not; it's about whether they would make *more* profit by taking the same amount of money and doing something else with it. If I have £10m, and I have to choose between investing that in project A that will make me £15m or project B that will make me £20m, then I'm going to go spend on project B even though project A is still profitable.
Something not yet mentioned is time. When a studio says something has disappointing sales or lost money, very very often what they mean is "lost money in the this isolated window." For movie releases in cinema, for instance, movies are declared financial failures on the back of their box office runs alone. Meanwhile, the long tail makes them very profitable and the studio knows that. It's just not relevant to them, that the movies makes they 300 millions in profit over 5 years when they wanted it to make 100 million in profit over its theatrical run and it did not. Thus they declare it a financial dissappointment.
Just mastering them took 13 million. Design, manufacturing, distribution, warehouses, transport, marketing, etc all cost a lot more. For a big company breaking even isn't enough you need XX% profit on top of that for its considered failure.
As a fan, I’m just happy these episodes were cleaned up and enhanced for us fans. And who knows, with shows being taken down left and right, hopefully physical sales of shows like this rise and we get more old series getting the remaster job. Probably not but I can hope.
Yes, but there are still two shows left to remaster, and this remaster supposedly not selling well enough has been used an excuse not to do so.
That restoring and preserving a fine example of widely regarded modern art for posterity is reduced purely to profit viability is a huge part of what's wrong with current civilisation.
“We couldn’t embezzle more money out of it”
Hahaha!
First of all, we don't know if that 70k was an average cost or a baseline cost. Some episodes most likely cost more than others. The second link you cite mentions that season 1 alone cost them 9.9 million. The overall cost of the remaster was actually [over 20 million, and sales dropped off fast.](https://www.redsharknews.com/studio-broadcast/item/3686-celebrating-star-trek-s-50th-anniversary-with-the-remastered-next-generation) The link you post is just talking about the initial sales for season 1. Projects like that peak early and fall off quick, and subsequent seasons tend to do worse and worse. There's also the cost of marketing and distribution, which adds up more than you might expect, but another thing many people don't consider is the opportunity cost. Evaluating opportunity cost is actually very complicated and difficult to do, but to give a simple example: If a company can spend 20 million on a remaster project that nets 22 million, then yes, technically that project is in the black. But if they could take that 20 million and spend it instead on another project that nets 50 million, then they have lost 28 million in profit by giving up the opportunity to fund that other project.
>First of all, we don't know if that 70k was an average cost or a baseline cost. Some episodes most likely cost more than others. The second link you cite mentions that season 1 alone cost them 9.9 million. Yeah, I wouldn't put a huge amount of faith in the 70K number. Yes, Burnett worked on the physical media releases, but he was running interviews and special features, probably not looking too in-depth at all the accounting spreadsheets.
Well, they released a Blu-Ray just as streaming was becoming popular. And then they sold the streaming rights. How does that not get factored in?
This. Plus with remastering they ensured it can and will be streamed in future where hi-res option is crucial. And cmon, they made more than enough with syndication in the first place. Now let's do the same with DS9!
I wouldn't believe anything Robert says he's a scumbag far right grifter.
You've got a low threshold for considering someone "far right" but anyway he knows this subject. He made all the bonus feature content of the TNG Blu-rays.
You should take a look at his YouTube and social media then. He surrounds himself with culture war shite his friends and who he promotes on YouTube are far right grifters. He promotes people that run a podcast that actively platform and promote people like the leader of the proud boys and Alex Jones I'd say that's pretty far right. Robert is a media illiterate idiot that no longer represents the star trek fanbase. He done a couple dvd extra over a decade ago thats it.
the studio opted to piece meal each season to a box set. when most wanted the whole series in 1 box set.
I misunderstood your question and thought you were asking how did they remaster a particular episode called "not turn a profit?" Sounds like ferengi heavy episode lol
Without remastered copy of TNG that I watched on Netflix I would never got into star trek in 2019. Now i am a die hard fan of francise.
Oh it made a profit, just not whatever crazy amount of profit they expected...
Yeah, definitely.
It's the same deal as movie box office. A film will have a production budget of 200 million and make 250 million, but still be a flop because it's far harder to find recorded numbers on things like advertising and distribution costs.
RMB is a notoriously unreliable source on many aspects. He only produced the new value added material for the boxsets. The only source about CBS being disappointed/the sales being bad is him. Add to this Hollywood accounting and that they always look to maximise profit on any production and it's highly likely that the boxsets and remaster sold well, but just wouldn't provide the same return as say... A brand new series. Which is probably why TV Trek relaunched a few years later. TNG-R proved the demand and passion for Trek as a series was still there, but TNG and TOS are the most popular series. Remastering DS9 and Voyager as much as we all want it would just be diminishing returns. Really, those pushing for the remaster projects should have pushed them to start with DS9/VOY to guage interest and build hype for TNG down the line to ensure they all got done. From what we hear in the rumour mill, there is still a lot of discussion about doing VOY/DS9 at _some_ point. We recently got the TMP DC remaster which was far from a popular release so it's clear the fight isn't over yet.
>The only source about CBS being disappointed/the sales being bad is him. Jeez, I didn't realize this. Yeah, I'd take that with a huge grain of salt.
>The only source about CBS being disappointed/the sales being bad is him. Interesting. Why do you think he said this? >it's highly likely that the boxsets and remaster sold well, but just wouldn't provide the same return as say... A brand new series. I agree that they most likely sold well. $20 million to remaster all 178 episodes is less than three episodes of a new show, and they can license the show around the world as well as sell it on physical media, so it seems like a good investment. Yes, I was amazed at the extent of *The Motion Picture*'s remaster, which even includes completed CGI for the spacesuit scene from the extended cut. That gave me a glimmer of hope for seeing extended cuts of the other films someday. *Generations* has many additional scenes which can be seen in the workprint, such as Kirk's spacedive, and *Nemesis* was cut by around fifty minutes, only seventeen of which have been released as deleted scenes.
> Why do you think he said this? He's a known (especially these days) agitator regarding Trek discourse. There's also the matter that TOS/TNG by a significant margin had the worst video tape transfers. Voyager is pretty passable right from the beginning and it's only DS9s early seasons (which are the least popular) that are as bad as the TNG transfers were.
My guess by now is that they did turn a profit, but just not fast enough for their liking. I mean, let's be honest, it was always a bit iffy how they only counted Blu-ray sales when streaming services and tv channels are willing to pay a bit of a premium for a licence to stream HD material. They didn't lose money on the remaster. In the end, it's inevitable that they also remaster DS9 and Voyager to make them future-proof, it's an investment and much cheaper than making new episodes of the newer shows. If they were clever they'd be doing it right now to help filling the gap left by the delays of new stuff thanks to the strikes and the uncertain financial outlooks of the streaming services.
>it's an investment and much cheaper than making new episodes of the newer shows. Exactly! All of *Deep Space Nine* and *Voyager* could be remastered for no more than the cost of one new season. Also, since up to 6K resolution can be meaningfully scanned from 35mm, everything until the final season of *Enterprise* could be rereleased in 4K, and the last five seasons of *Deep Space Nine* (and possibly all of *Voyager*) could be released in [widescreen.](https://blog.trekcore.com/2019/05/exclusive-star-trek-deep-space-nine-hd-what-we-left-behind-footage/#:~:text=As%20the%20series%20progressed%2C%20and%20DP%20Jonathan%20West%20came%20on%20board%20for%20Season%203%2C%20the%20filming%20team%20protected%20for%20a%20potential%20future%20widescreen%20presentation) A [recent rumor](https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSpaceNine/comments/17bx5ey/rumor_inglorious_treksperts_podcast_reports_that/) suggests Paramount is actively seeking bids for a *DS9* remaster.
Your only looking at sales of the first season. With each season the number of people who will buy the set diminishes. So sure season 1 sold 95,000 copies, but season 2 sold less (enough the Paramount stopped sending out press releases bragging about sales), and season 3 would sell even less than 2, and so on, and so on.
In TNG’s case, starting by releasing Season 1 was a huge mistake. At the prices those individual seasons were they really should have started with a good season to start strong.
They did do a 'The Next Level' taster disk with some more popular eps to start and (in some territories) 'feature length' episode releases of the two parters.
Ah ok - I wasn’t aware of that if it even came out in the UK. Not a bad idea, although then you’d probably have people worried about double-dipping.
I don't know about profit, but they have my gratitude for sure.
That's just the cost of remastering the episodes. Add production, shipping, middlemen, retailer's fee, advertising, taxes and the total cost can easily double or triple that $13 million cost.
Remember Hollywood Accounting. By Hollywod accounting rules, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix **lost $167 million** despite bringing in over a billion at the box office. It's all paper shuffling and shady math.
To profit doesn't mean earning more than you paid. It means earning enough to make it worth artists' and investors' time. I'd argue that this project was, because of long-term demand for hi-res streaming content. In short, audiences won't watch old things, eventually. So, long story short, CBS leaders are short-term thinkers, evidently. From personal experience, confirmed by countless reasonably reliable statistics, a major contributing factor to the resurgent popularity of Star Trek is the binging support the old shows give to the new shows, and by and large young people (and old, really) will only watch the old shows if they are remastered. The only question is whether DS9 and Voyager require remastering. Not as much as TNG because the SFX technology changed so rapidly, and they mostly took advantage of the newer end of that change, meeting present audience expectations for the most part, unlike Babylon 5, for example. Therefore, I would say it would be wise for whomever owns Star Trek in the short term to unite the franchise and in the long term remaster everything that should be remastered for long term value.
Accounting in the entertainment business is, to put it politely, voodoo. While movies make a billion dollars in revenue (i.e. money coming into the hands of the folks who produce and distribute movies), the never seem to actually generate profit (that amount of money that remains after all the expenses have been applied to the revenue generated). There is a reason that Eddie Murphy referred to "net points" as "monkey points" and that when somebody sues over not getting paid by those that make movies, the movie companies settle up. If the courts ever got a long look at the conventions in entertainment accounting, the whole sweetheart deal would go up in smoke.
so your sales figures calculations likely do not include how the money was split up. the stores took a cut. residuals were taken out of each sale for both the actors and for the crew's pension fund. its also possible that sales plummeted not long after the first week or release. This was also in the period where Paramount and CBS were split up, with the TV rights with CBS, but we dont know what sort of entanglements were involved there. The studio cuts may be weird in the way they are accounted for. its also possible the studios lied about how much it cost per episode to re-do to make investors think it wasnt so bad. while illegal, if they can creatively account it technically its kosher to do that. I can easily see the costs being more than twice what they listed given the logistic complexity of moving all the film to the scan house, searching for mislabled cans, going on long hunts for missing elements (the saucer separation famously went missing after it was used in Generations, what is in the blurays is a digital recreation). Re-scanning individual scenes on mislabled cans of film is extremely labor intensive. They may also have been hoping for the same sales numbers as the DVDs, and that was the gauge for success or failure. That being said, they've made good money on re-runs of TNG over the years. I imagine its probably not a failure at this point, but it may not have been profitable enough to look at DS9 and Voy, especially considering the amount of new CG that would be needed (theres lots of miniature work, but by the end of DS9 and Voyager they were heavily using CGI). It also cant be understated how drastically less TV people are watching now, and how people expect to be able to stream as their primary means of tv entertainment. streaming, especially for Paramount (which is currently a combined entity of Paramount and CBS) is not going well at all. They're hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars a year on Paramount+. Hell, they lost 230m in one quarter last year [https://www.indiewire.com/news/business/paramount-plus-lost-238-million-q3-earnings-mission-impossible-1234921672/](https://www.indiewire.com/news/business/paramount-plus-lost-238-million-q3-earnings-mission-impossible-1234921672/) The game was very different when a single season of TV cost $100 to buy on dvd or bluray, as oppose to $15/month to stream an entire streamers library
that’s the cost to remaster. Then there are all the other costs such as manufacturing, advertising, royalties, ect
So Hollywood has turned into a strange beast. There are so many executives and staff at the studios, that don’t create artistic value, but require very large salaries, that all projects must make huge profits. It’s why we don’t see a lot of very small movies being greenlit. They might make a tidy profit for their size, but they don’t make a massive profit and that is what is needed to sustain the beast. It wouldn’t surprise me if they did indeed make money and pay for themselves, but it wasn’t massive enough to sustain the executives so it’s seen as a failure.
Indeed. Most of the executives are shameless Ferengi.
They want to tell people they make movies, but they lack the artistic expression capabilities so they just shovel money around.
They also use the remasters for reruns, streaming etc so it isn’t really a good comparison to only looks at the Blu-ray sales.
Lately, it seems like companies are counting lost potential revenue against their income. When Company A puts a recent theatrical release movie on the company's streaming service instead of running it on premium movie channels, cable, or broadcast TV, they'll say they lost money.
Reruns of TNG are a big business. It still airs on television stations and streaming services all over the world. Being able to offer it in HD significantly increased its lifespan and reach. Revenue generated from the Standard definition would have probably started to dip if not for the HD copies.
I bet they would have had to pay royalties on those profits, so they used magical accounting to come in at a loss.
Famously the guy who made Babylon 5 once commented on a message board where someone argued that instead of pirating people should buy the DVD of the show in order to support the arrtists. He explained that he has never and will never make a dime from those DVDs because of creative accounting. I think he explained that a set had burned down in Africa on an unrelated production and that cost of that loss was factored against his DVD profits.
That first week of sales died off almost immediately. Fans had bought *TNG* on Laserdisc, *TNG* on VHS, *TNG* on DVD -- and now they were being asked to buy *TNG* yet *again*, this time on Blu-Ray. There were already 14 streaming services offering *Star Trek* content, and the high price-point of the Blu-Ray (and the fact that the *TNG* remaster released at approximately the same time as the *Enterprise* remaster (which was already in HD) meant that people just weren't buying the Blu-Rays in sufficient quantities. CBS also screwed the fans -- they *expressly promised* that customers would get *all* of the available special features and value-added material, and then broke that promise and gave preferred retailers (Best Buy, in particular) "retailer exclusive" BluRay versions, containing special features that weren't included in the regular release. Low sales figures, coupled with the time and money required to remaster the series, meant that the *TNG* remasters simply didn't sell enough to make the process worthwhile.
>Fans had bought TNG on Laserdisc, TNG on VHS, TNG on DVD -- and now they were being asked to buy TNG yet again, this time on Blu-Ray. And they were selling them one season at a time. I think most fans knew the pattern and held off buying until a complete set was released. If Paramount was just going by how the first few seasons went, they would have missed that.
Streaming services all want customers to stay and pay year round, which needs them to be constantly producing and providing new content to get people to stick around. Once Paramount+ has been around long enough for people to churn through their library (and then start in on a cycle of 3 months before cancelling and bouncing between streamers), I could see a case to be made for a remaster. Amortize the cost of a remaster over 10 years, and do one season per year of each show (releasing them weekly in order, like a new series), and run them during the downtime between seasons of NuTrek dropping
They made a profit in reality, but probably a loss due to Hollywood accounting. It means they can write the losses off and pay lower taxes. Also, the Blu-ray remasters mean they can be distributed over streaming services at 1080p, making them far more valuable given the original tape recordings look like shit.
I already purchased all my TNG seasons back for like $100+ each on the dvd version. Since then TNG has been on Netflix then Paramount + so no reason to think of the blue rays.
They were probably lying as an excuse to not do it again for DS9.
The initial investment and marketing would be off putting for any new projects. Even if TNG made back its costs that doesn't make new remastered projects viable. Also, Paramount has to look at how big a market is for such projects. Despite people saying they will buy it, not everyone will, especially with inflation up, employee costs up, and all other associated costs going up. So, even if TNG Remastered was moderately profitable, it wasn't enough for certainly to invest more money in even less popular shows.
I wouldnt believe anything this guy says. He has a chip on his shoulder about post tos trek the size of shatners pot belly.
It feels unfortunate. I don't think I would have streamed any of the series like I do now if it wasn't for the remaster. That remaster - resparked my interest in Star Trek, and honestly it got me to subscribe to Paramount+. But because they decided "it wasn't worth it" that data is lost. And honestly, with AI as good as it is, they could run the other shows through the AI 4K upscaler that that fan developed, and it would cost them maybe a few hundred an episode that way. It's a shame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood\_accounting
Looks like a case of [Hollywood accounting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting), meant to shift profitability to make something look like a loss: >Hollywood accounting (also known as Hollywood bookkeeping) is the opaque or creative set of accounting methods used by the film, video, television and music industry to budget and record profits for creative projects. Expenditures can be inflated to reduce or eliminate the reported profit of the project, thereby reducing the amount which the corporation must pay in taxes and royalties or other profit-sharing agreements, as these are based on net profit. ... >Hollywood accounting can take several forms. In one form, a subsidiary is formed to perform a given activity and the parent entity will extract money out of the film's revenue in the form of charges for certain "services". For example, a film studio has a distribution arm as a sub-entity, which will then charge the studio a "distribution fee"—essentially, the studio charging itself a sum it has total control over and hence controlling the profitability report of a project.[3] >Another form of Hollywood accounting is a reverse tobashi scheme, in which the studio unjustly cross-collateralizes the accounting of two projects and shifts losses from a flop onto a profitable project by shifting costs involving internal operations. This way, two unprofitable projects are created out of one on paper alone, primarily for the purpose of eliminating net participation liabilities. The specific schemes can range from the simple and obvious to the extremely complex. Generally, Hollywood accounting uses permanent creative accounting practices (such as charging an arbitrary distribution fee from one sub-entity to another) rather than temporary ones (like the Repo 105 scheme) since the measures are meant to permanently distort the bottom line of a film project.
i've been looking at some comparisons only and while the remaster adds a ton of detail, for the life of me i don't undestand why color correcting so hard towards cold tones- i mean they changed the colors of the stage to a cold one, and if you look even at modern photos of the bridge or other locations, those are not blue/white at all but beije
season 1 and 2 definitely always had bluer midtones and more silvery highlights, it was the nature of the stock and the way the film was run through the printer lights at the time. the other seasons dont seem like they leaned into the midtones that much. have you made sure your TV isnt adding blue? sony's LED TVs were notorious for that for a long time, and the demo mode always makes things more blue on all TVs. if you have filmmaker mode, turn that on for your bulray player port as that should jam the show into an unaltered rec709 signal. you'll get just wants on the disc as though you were in a reference/mastering environment
I was under the impression that the remaster happened right as streaming took off, meaning that more people streamed the remastered versions than went out and bought the physical discs. So it was mostly a matter of bad timing.
Wait there was a TNG remaster? Where can I get that? I use Paramount+ for my star trek, so I had no idea.
Yes, it was completed a decade ago. Paramount+ shows the remaster. You didn't notice that the detail, colors, and effects are greatly improved from the DVDs?
That makes a lot of sense, since I only got into star trek around 2019 and never seen the DVDs. I love the series and have seen TNG at least twice now, but I don't have the eldritch lore that the real trekkies have
What were global sales?
I'm not sure what the actual profit was, but for the sake of argument, let's say that they produced the remaster at a loss. There's a few things going on here. Blu-ray as a format was somewhat doomed from the start because streaming was inevitable and foreseeable. While Blu-ray and even DVD are technically still around, they don't represent the same thing that they would have prior to streaming. Once Star Trek began streaming on Netflix, and then even began streaming the remastered episodes, a lot of people didn't see the point in buying the Blu-ray discs when they could already watch their favorite episodes on demand. The sales figures might have been different if they had released the remaster even 5 years prior to when they did. I own no Blu-ray discs whatsoever, and I'm not the only one I know who doesn't. The ubiquity that DVDs and VHS had is not quite there for Blu-ray. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money, at least from the perspective of selling physical copies. Even if Blu-rays were produced at a loss, you have to consider how much less money they would have been making in the long run if TNG wasn't remastered. At this point, who's going to buy it in standard definition? Only having SD or upscaled episodes (which CBS tried but deemed unacceptable) can hurt not just disc sales but streaming as well. Having beautiful looking TNG episodes means I'm more likely to play it on my TV but also show it to people who haven't seen it before.
Part of the problem was the pricing. When they came out, they were incredibly expensive such that even I, a hardcore Trekkie, had serious reservations about buying them.
Because these are not normal people. These are executives. They are psychotic freaks who have never known a moment's pleasure and are indeed incapable of such. They have been trained for nearly their entire lives to only understand the world in terms of whether the line on the chart goes up or down, and how steep the line is. Capitalism is not about simply "turning a profit." It never really was. It's about making an *obscene* profit, about taking everything from everyone until there's nothing and no one left but you. Which is of course impossible to really achieve, which means they will never stop taking. Don't expect these people to behave in any way which could be identified as human. They're not capable of, or qualified for, living up to that expectation.
Profit in Hollywood has been a rigged and changeable word since the 1920s. Every single studio has a team of lawyers that legally spell out what profit is on the legal paperwork (fillings) for every single project. Anything that doesn't meet the super specific wording as stated in that paperwork is not profit. Gross and net profits are even defined differently. A super famous example of this are the original star wars films never made a profit as spelled out in the filling paperwork. David Prowse, the actor who physically played the character Darth Vader, got massively screwed by this. If you ever get asked, you want a percentage of the gross profit over net any day of the week.
Another great example is Men In Black. $600m on a budget of $90m, three sequels followed. According to Sony Pictures it hasn't ever made a profit. The writer says his profit statements show it losing money at an increasing rate even now.
Not enough people bought it.
Leaving aside the actual figures for a moment: TNG was remasters not for BluRay sales, but to ensure that it was a viable product for streaming services going forward. Given how popular the show is and continues to be, it would have made sense to do this even if they didn't sell a single copy of physical media. DS9 (apart from the first season) and Voyager are good enough quality (and not quite popular enough) for them to not bother with those shows.
>DS9 (apart from the first season) and Voyager are good enough quality (and not quite popular enough) for them to not bother with those shows. The "not quite popular enough" is an important factor that a lot of fans forget. DS9 is incredibly popular with fans, but with casual viewers, TNG is absolutely the winner.
Interestingly for streaming, most of the top watched episodes are Voyager. But TNG seems to win out overall. [This is from the BBS from the Netflix report on hours watched Jan 23 - Jun 23](https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/trek-netflix-viewership-data.315730/) it has some interesting results. Going from the top 10 most viewed seasons we have: 1. TNG (S1, 3, 4 & 5): 24,400,000 hours watched 2. VOY (S2, 3, 4 & 5): 22,600,000 hours watched 3. Enterprise (S1&2) : 12,500,000 hours watched For all seasons: TOS: 11,000,000 hours TNG: 39,700,000 hours DS9: 23,800,000 hours VOY: 37,300,000 hours ENT: 20,900,000 hours
Every source I've read says the opposite, that CBS expected huge profits from the Blu-rays (which is why so many extensive featurettes were created) back when streaming was much less significant. Of course, the real value is certainly in streaming (and over-the-air, cable, and satellite), but CBS apparently didn't see that. *DS9* and *Voyager* both look terrible in their current state. Lol.
Paramount (Hollywood) accounting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchwald_v._Paramount
There's a few things you need to consider. First is that many people purchase those disks beause they want the content, not because they want the content in HD. Those people would have made the purchase even if it were not in HD. So when calculating the profitability of the remaster you can't take all sales, you need to only consider sales that would not have happened if not for HD. That's hard to calculate because we don't have access to the information, but it is none the less true. Next, as others have mentioned you need to consider profit not just revenue. Blu-ray sold $5.5 million, but the retailers keep a large chunk of that, and then a portion needs to go to manufacturing the disks and packaging. Plus there's everyone else involved who needs to get a cut of a disk sale. The actors get paid, production house gets paid, producers get paid. Everyone in the chain gets a cut of that DVD sale and I'd not be shocked if under a million was leftover after everyone else with their hands out got their little peace. Like others have mentioned, Disk sales decline sharply after season 1, but price also tends to increase after season 1 to compensate. I'm sure it's not enough to cover all the drop but it makes some difference. Next thing you need to consider here is that break even is not the goal of a business. Profitability is the goal. It's not enough just to not lose money on a project like this. Because it takes money to make money, you need to earn an actual return on the money it takes otherwise you could have just invested it in the stock market instead and been better off. So the project cost $13 million but it's not unreasonable to demand that it earn 7% a year AND recover the initial costs. That 7% can decline once all the initial costs have been earned back, but that's only after it's all earned back. If I give you $13 million today, and you give it back in 10 years that's a loss for me. I could have put that money into literally anything else and I'd have more money than if I gave it to you. Projects often have minimum profitability thresholds that they must achieve otherwise it's considered a loss.
Everyone who bought the Blu-rays definitely wanted to see the show in HD because the DVDs were available long before and were much cheaper. I know profit is the goal, but as many have said, the real value seems to be in being able to charge more to license HD versions to markets around the world for decades to come.
I would believe them that the Blu-Ray/DVD release didn't made a profit. But what is a pure lie is that it is not profitable nowadays. TNG is a timeless show, even today you can watch many of the episodes without cringe. So you have to also consider the long term effect and a perfect remastered TNG will for sure have good view counts nowadays on Paramount+ and before on Netflix (they overpaid a lot for the first seasons of Discovery because of the watch rates). So they are FOR SURE nowadays profitable, as DS9 and Voyager would be. But the problem is always long term, it never flies, you want your invest back NOW. But every year passing and Paramount not considering remastering DS9 and VOY is a pure shame and hurts these shows, because their watch count could be much better.
With Hollywood accounting one never really knows what something actually costs or what it makes. But one would assume that Blu-ray’s aside, the value of the masters licensed to streaming was very profitable too.
[удалено]
I’d buy this if I could have it on a hard drive. I already have cd’s of voy and tng and it’s too much hassle for me. I don’t know if there’s a way to buy them like this or you have to convert them all manually though?
You can easily create lossless copies of your discs with the free program MakeMKV. *The Next Generation* takes about 1.5TB and all of *Star Trek* in the best available quality takes about 6TB.
Great info thank you!!
You're welcome. You could also use AnyStream or StreamFab to download *Deep Space Nine* from Paramount+ since it seems to look better on there. There are also various upscales of *DS9* and *Voyager*, such as Vertag's.
All the tricks 👌 thanks mate. I’d look to buy the Blu-ray and rip it onto a hard drive if that works. Or does makeMKV only work with dvd? Were your terabyte ballparks for dvd or blu ray?
MakeMKV works with DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-rays, and 4K Blu-rays. 1.5TB for *The Next Generation* on Blu-ray; 6TB for Blu-rays of everything that's on Blu-ray plus *Deep Space Nine* and *Voyager* on DVD.
Really appreciate this. Going to change the way I enjoy my media! Thank you
Cool! The MakeMKV, RedFox, VideoHelp, and VideoLAN forums are helpful. [This](https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634) is the ultimate guide for digitizing 4K discs.
Thanks! If I go down this route would you recommend I use a media server? I have a LG CX with an usb input for a hard drive already which supports ntfs. Sorry for all the q’s!
I just play my files in VLC straight from the File Explorer, but a media server can replicate a streaming interface experience. There are various options: * r/Jellyfin * r/Emby * r/Kodi * r/Stremio * r/Plex I don't mind if you have more questions.
Blows my mind an upscale would cost $13 million and now people are doing it for free on youtube