“Finally, when they settled on making a big movie with a class-A director, Robert Wise, that put it into a whole different category,” Shatner tells The Hollywood Reporter. At the helm would be Robert Wise, who directed the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still and won Oscars for The Sound of Music and West Side Story. On March 28, 1978, Eisner and chairman Barry Diller held a huge press conference on the lot to announce that Star Trek: The Motion Picture would premiere on the big screen as a $15 million production, complete with the show’s original cast and big-name director. With these shifting genre appetites growing stronger, and with Paramount struggling with the reality of selling a fourth TV network to a broad enough market, then-president Michael Eisner pulled the plug on Phase II in November of that year, just days before it was set to begin production, in exchange for a big-screen experience. Then in 1977, the one-two punch of George Lucas’ Star Wars, followed by Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, broke the box-office mold and changed the scope of how audiences demanded their sci-fi escapism. Driven by devoted fan fervor, the “wagon train to the stars” had already demonstrated its staying power with a strong second life, thanks to local television syndication, a Saturday morning animated series, Trek conventions, an explosion of merchandising and a finger on the pulse of the pop-culture zeitgeist.Įncouraged by the phenomenon Trek had become and maneuvering to launch its own TV network, Paramount began retooling Roddenberry’s series for a live-action return to television to be known as Star Trek: Phase II after flirting a few times with the concept of a big-screen outing. In the decade following its 1966 series debut on NBC, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trekmanaged to travel far beyond the final frontier, despite being sent to the spaceship graveyard after only three seasons.
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