Berman PA Claims Star Trek Is Dead For the Moment

"Les Moonves hates all things Sci-Fi," a former Paramount assistant claimed, explaining that he did not think the new head of CBS was at all interested in reviving Star Trek.

Since the Viacom-CBS split last year, CBS has controlled the television franchise, and Rick Berman's assistant Doug Mirabello said that there is not likely to be a new Star Trek series or film for quite some time. In an interview at Sci Fi Pulse, Mirabello suggested that the franchise needs an entirely new creative team.

The comments were quoted in Dreamwatch after appearing at the Something Awful forums, where Mirabello claimed that the script written by Erik Jendresen for a potential eleventh Star Trek movie had been rejected and that despite Patrick Stewart's recent comments that he had had discussions about a possible future Next Generation film, "It’s more likely that some executive had a casual conversation with him and brought up some hypotheticals which he ran with when some reporter asked him about Star Trek."

Mirabello admitted that it was possible "Paramount is planning something huge and keeping us out of the loop" but he did not believe that Stewart would do another Star Trek movie "unless they paid him Professor X money" - a reference to Stewart's paycheck for the X-Men series.

The Berman assistant said that Star Trek had been successful in the 1980s but "never really evolved with the times." He mentioned an incident where a director went to the producers to "tell them he was ashamed to direct the episode where our crew turned into lizard people" (presumably Voyager's "Threshold"). The Enterprise finale "was one of those where you’d go down to the stage and see people shaking their heads while reading the script."

With UPN and the WB merging, and with Moonves allegedly having expressed disinterest in science fiction - though executives at CBS gave Brannon Braga's Threshold the green light this season - Mirabello was not optimistic about a future for Star Trek, which he said might be for the best, to give the franchise "some time off, and a cool new approach."

The full article is at Sci Fi Pulse.

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