Star Trek films/Summary/Performance summary

Domestically, combined and not taking inflation into account, the Star Trek features have grossed a little over US$1.4 billion. Prior to the release of , had grossed more than the other films, coming in at US$109,713,132, while had the largest-grossing opening weekend of all the films. The alternate reality film surpassed both of these records, but was itself surpassed by its sequel. 
Using the figures in the above specified tables, a "Top 5" worldwide performance record for the films as of 2016 is summarized in the table below, which hold a few surprises. The costs are, as expected, in accordance with the sequence the films were produced in, with The Motion Picture, being the sole exception due to various reasons. Rather surprising is that the best received films are not always also the highest grossing, The Voyage Home being the most consistent one. However, the biggest surprise in this regard, the bad press the film received in the 1980s and 1990s notwithstanding – among others by the studio itself, who considered the film a failure at the time – is that The Motion Picture as one of the worst received films, is not only the highest grossing Original Crew film world-wide, but concurrently also one of the most profitable films in the franchise. Likewise, but on the other end of the spectrum, Beyond became one of the best received films, but also the second-worst in terms of gross profitability.
The table shows that the TNG films were the least successful ones of the franchise in critical and financial terms, First Contact being the sole positive exception – even becoming the highest worldwide grossing Star Trek-prime film – the apparent profitability of Generations (see that film's footnote above) notwithstanding. In terms of gross profitability, the six Original Series films remain to date the most successful ones by far.
However, while there is a correlation between costs and profitability, the real surprise lies in the recent lack of positive correlation between gross revenues and profitability. That Nemesis and Insurrection occupy the first and third place respectively in the worst profitability ranking comes hardly as a surprise, considering their poor performance at the box office. But a break occurred in the correlation with the three alternate reality films, which were the most successful in terms of box office revenues of the franchise by far, but which also rank among the least profitable, even losing, ones – Star Trek Beyond in particular, taking second place in the worst profitability ranking – making it appear that the more successful a film is at the box office, the worse its profitability becomes.
The significant jump in production budget of 29% (over ten times the official inflation rate for the period 1996-1998) between the films First Contact and Insurrection, validated Adam Lebowitz's assertion that the technique of computer-generated imagery (CGI) for producing visual effects, which was used almost exclusively for the latter film and contrary to popular belief, is not cheaper than the traditional way of producing these. "A lot of people say, 'CGI is a lot cheaper, isn't it,' but the way I like to think of it is that CGI is not cheaper necessarily, but you get a lot more for your money and you can tweak it a lot more.", Lebowitz has stated. () If anything has exemplified Lebowitz's assessment, then it must have been the number of staffers Industrial Light & Magic had employed on their Star Trek projects; whereas The Search for Spock "only" needed 42 staffers, the staff-count for Star Trek (2009) had burgeoned to no less than 315, virtually all of them working as digital specialists.
Star Trek Into Darkness marks the first time that a Star Trek film performed better in the foreign markets than the home market, confirming an industry trend that has started in the early 2000s. 
As already stated above, the 2016 film Star Trek Beyond, even though it even surpassed its predecessor critically, performed catastrophically at the box-office (see also below) which became a major consideration for the cancellation in January 2019 of the planned fourth alternate reality film, slated to start production in that year.
Ranking per 2017	Best reception	Worst reception	Highest worldwide gross	Lowest worldwide gross	Most costly	Least costly	Most profitable gross	Least profitable gross
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|-| Gross vs net profitability=It must be understood that when box-office earnings surpass the direct production budget (thereby achieving gross profitability), it does not automatically mean that a Hollywood studio has gone "into (net) profit", i.e. meaning that the studio has now funding available for investments, dividend disbursements to shareholders and third party investors, executive bonuses, royalties, and the like. Aside from the direct production costs, aka the production budget, the studio also needs to cover costs which, for legal as well as practical reasons, can not be directly assigned to a particular motion picture production and which are commonly referred to as "indirect" or "production overhead" costs, in parlance usually abbreviated to "overhead". The most obvious overhead elements consist of:
* Operations/Management costs: These are incurred in order to maintain a studio, such as the costs for the upkeep of real estate and equipment, as well as the salaries for personnel who have studio tenure, such as executive, accountancy, administrative, technical and marketing staffers. The actual production staffers on any motion picture project, are contracted on a per production basis, and their salaries are therefore directly assignable to the production budget. (See also in this regard: Desilu Studios.)
* Distribution costs: These entail the box office percentages, distributors and theater owners charge the studio for showing their production to the public, in order to operate their own businesses. Since it is never known beforehand how many theaters will agree to show a studio production, these costs are traditionally considered overhead.
* Marketing/Promotion costs: While the average "Trekkie" might mistakenly believe that any Star Trek live-action production sells itself, this is a viewpoint emphatically not shared by Paramount. In effect, the official standpoint taken by Paramount is to dismiss Trekdom altogether, deeming it too inconsequential, both in scope and in size, to warrant the consideration of any possible Star Trek live-action (both film and television) production development in and of itself. (A Vision of the Future - Star Trek: Voyager, pp. 139-140) Paramount therefore treats each Star Trek production as they would any other, each required to attract a renewed viewership, and each therefore warranting considerable promotional efforts. While a general overall promotion strategy might be devised before the start of a production, the nature and extent is usually fleshed out over the course of the production (if only for the fact that trailers and commercials have to wait for footage to have been actually shot), meaning that cost totals can not be determined with any measure of objectivity beforehand, therefore causing them to be subordinated under overhead for practicality. Traditionally, marketing costs are a substantial part of the overhead, having inflated considerably from the early 2000s onward; David Gerrold has reported that these costs for The Motion Picture were already estimated at US$10-$20 million, accounting for a third to half of over-production budget expenditures alone, which, for those times, was already exceptionally high. (, issue 30, p. 37)To an extent, Paramount's stance has validated itself by the considerable success The Voyage Home, First Contact, and the first two alternate universe films in particular have enjoyed, as these attracted a viewership (though not necessarily new fans) that went well above and beyond traditional Trekdom alone, as was evidenced by their respective outlying box office takes. Even more apparent, but then at the opposite end of the spectrum, became the validity, when Paramount failed to attract renewed viewership for Star Trek Beyond; While the film was in general favorably received by critics and traditional Trekdom alike, the mere fact that others – enjoying a plethora of other alternatives by that time, most notably those of the by-then relaunched Star Wars and the ongoing film franchises – failed to show up at the cinemas, made Beyond at that time the second all-time worst performing Star Trek film for Paramount in terms of profitability. This became a major consideration for the decision to cancel the fourth alternate universe film in early January 2019, reportedly because of relaunched Star Wars, thereby conceivably cancelling the entire alternate universe story line all together. 
* Sundry aka Unforeseen costs: While largely self-explanatory, these costs can also include actual production costs incurred after principal photography – traditionally seen as the "Production" stage of a film production – has finished, which were not foreseen when the production budget was calculated. For example, its visual effects sequences slated to be entirely produced with CGI, Star Trek: Insurrection was nearing completion in post-production when it was decided that for some key effects sequences the digital technique would not do, and that additional visual effects companies had to be brought in at the last minute to remedy the situation. Traditionally, the production budget is then not adjusted upward in these particular circumstances, with the additional expenditure booked as "unforeseen". Something similar had actually already occurred two decades earlier with The Motion Picture. When the February 1979 visual effects debacle took place after principal photography had wrapped, new effects companies had to be brought in by the studio at the eleventh hour to (re)produce these effects from scratch. In this specific case however, the studio decided to have the additional costs of approximately US$10 million included in its publicly divulged production budget as part of questionable studio politics, explaining the discrepancy between the official production budget listed above, and the widely propagated and best known one of US$45 million. (see: The Motion Picture: Costs and revenues) Reshooting scenes after-the-fact for which principal cast had to be recalled, also fall under this heading, as was the case with Generations and Insurrection.
* Corporate taxes: Self-explanatory.
The traditional Hollywood rule of thumb of determining the point when a motion picture production becomes net profitable for a studio, has been the application of a multiplier to the direct production budget, or as Gerrold has further explained, "(…)a film has to earn two to three times as much as it costs to make, before it breaks even. Otherwise, you have lost your shirt." (, issue 30, p. 37) Applying an average multiplier of 2.5 to the above listed figures, or achieving 250% of the production budget in box-office takes, reveal that two of the Star Trek films have barely broke even (unsurprisingly including The Final Frontier, but surprisingly the 2009 blockbuster outing as well), whereas the last two Next Generation films, as well as Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond have actually lost the studio money, substantial losses at that in the cases of Insurrection, Nemesis, and Beyond.
One obvious rationale for the lack of profitability of the alternate reality films lies in the circumstance that Paramount had, together with Warner Bros. in a US$60 million deal, partnered up with Bad Robot Productions in 2006 for the development of its motion picture projects, those of Star Trek included. Therefore, in addition to the undisclosed, but undoubtedly hefty license fees Paramount had to pay franchise owner CBS Corporation, all income derived from the box offices takes needed now to be shared with a major co-producer as well, where there had been none before, cutting deeply in the gross profits. The fact that Bad Robot withdrew from the partnership in November 2018, was in effect one of the other major considerations for Paramount to cancel the fourth alternate reality film in January 2019. 
As a whole, the four decades old film franchise performance of all thirteen films combined yields the following, showing that the film franchise has been net profitable for the studio, albeit modestly so, mostly because of the alternate reality films as they involved he largest amount of money. When applying the 2.5 multiplier, an approximately 4.2% net return on investment remains, until the 2010s not even enough to cancel out inflation and then easily attainable by just putting your money safely away in a bank savings account. The studio therefore had to mostly rely on revenues stemming from other spin-off franchise elements in all forms and formats, such as television rights and merchandise, in order to show shareholders/investors a more healthy rate of return.
Critical Reception	Domestic Gross	Foreign Gross	Worldwide Gross	Budget (est.)	Profitability Gross
71% (avg) 	1,400,952,742 	862,679,597 	2,263,632,339 	868,800,000 	261%
 	 	 	 	 	
It is in this regard that another Paramount production deserves a mention, the 1997 eleven Academy Award winning Titanic, served by such Star Trek alumni as Robert Legato, Don Pennington, James Horner, and Tony Meininger. With a worldwide gross of US$2.2 billion – being the very first film in motion picture history to breach the two billion mark – against a production budget of US$200 million, it did achieve a (for the times) mind-boggling 1,100% gross profitability. This was especially astounding when the amount of money involved was considered, as that film alone, grossing the same amount as all thirteen Star Trek films combined, netted the studio US$1.7 billion in (net) profit, that is, in theory at least when discounting the below-mentioned "Hollywood accounting" phenomenon. The film stands to this very day out as Paramount's biggest success in its entire history by far, as well as being universally considered as one of the motion picture industry's greatest triumphs for that matter. Like it had with The Motion Picture, the studio had staked its very continued existence on Titanic, in the process forced to seek out 20th Century Fox as a production production partner (see also: The Motion Picture: Costs and revenues).
Still, while the rationale behind the net profitability determining methodology is valid, the methodology itself has proven to be susceptible to figures manipulation, leading up to the infamous "Hollywood accounting" phenomenon, possibly explaining not only the apparent high profitability of The Wrath of Khan and Generations – an absolute rarity where "Hollywood accounting" is concerned as explained below – but also the recent and apparent lack of profitability of the alternate reality films. It should concurrently be noted that additional revenues, derived from later merchandise, television rights and home media sales, are traditionally discounted by Hollywood studios in their public performance assessments for a film, meaning that even loss generating productions have the potential to turn net profitable in the long run. However, the circumstance that Bad Robot had, through its many subsidiaries, negotiated a substantial say – and thus a part of the revenue stream – in the resultant merchandise, including the home media formats, meant that that potential had for Paramount been considerably diminished as well where the alternate reality films were concerned.
|-| Hollywood accounting="", or "Hollywood bookkeeping" as it is also referred to, is a particularly nefarious phenomenon in the motion picture industry which entails that, simply put, production stakeholders, such as shareholders, actors, producers, writers, production companies, local governments, and the like, who have entered in a net profit sharing agreement with the studio, are essentially "defrauded" as much as possible out of their legally entitled shares by means of untoward bookkeeping methods. These methods typically entail inflating expenses such as production, distribution, and marketing (a very popular one with studios, as these, whether or not justified, have gone truly through the roof from the early 2000s onward), overhead and, most notoriously, the production budget "sundry costs" with as much elements as possible, not rarely utterly undue.
The industry phenomenon is to date deeply ingrained, widespread, persistent, and pervasive and by no means limited to Paramount Pictures or film productions alone, as Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry found out to his detriment after he discovered he too was on the receiving end of this phenomenon when he signed both his 18 May 1965 and 1978 The Motion Picture net profit sharing deals. "The greatest science fiction in show biz is in the accounting", a chagrined Roddenberry declared when he ordered his attorney Leonard Maizlish to start legal proceedings against the studio in 1981, after being faced with the studio's emphatic assertions that he still was not entitled to his share of the profits since the Original Series was ostensibly still deeply "in the red", despite its wildly successful decade-long run in syndication. (, issue 43, p. 14) A particularly notorious instance was, for example, , who in 2009 still maintained that their 1983 third Star Wars installment, Return of the Jedi, "has never gone into profit", despite having earned a recorded US$475 million against a production budget of US$32.5 million (constituting a whopping 1,462% gross profitability, but while impressive, involving far less money than the above-mentioned Titanic) by that point, shortchanging several actors who had unwisely entered into a net profit sharing agreement. 
Paramount itself got caught in the act when it was successfully sued by screen writer Art Buchwald (thereby succeeding where Maizlish, on behalf of Roddenberry, had seemingly failed seven years earlier) who found himself in a similar predicament in the case of Paramount's 1988 motion picture Coming to America (starring Eddie Murphy), which grossed over ten times its budget of US$39 million. It was actually this case that brought the "Hollywood accounting" phenomenon to the full awareness of the general public. Finding itself highly scrutinized by the media at the time, Paramount was ultimately ordered by the courts to settle for US$900,000 in 1992. 
However, as it is still very much a gray area in corporate accounting law, it has, despite the adverse court ruling, not in the least deterred Paramount, or any other Hollywood studio for that matter, to continue with the practice unabated, to the point where it has become near-pandemic in the 2000s. Several Hollywood reporters have recorded that few, if any, of the biggest box-office successes of the past decades had, as of 2010, actually turned in an official net studio profit, that is, on paper at least. This actually made Hollywood studios one of the very worst properties to invest in, as many shareholders and third-party investors can now attest to. Despite a class-action brought against the entire industry before a Federal Court in 1996, the financial gains apparently still far outweigh the costs of any possible legal litigation. The three alternate universe films, Star Trek, Into Darkness, and Beyond, for example, are officially reported as among the least profitable, even losing, Star Trek productions by Paramount, despite grossing close to US$1.2 billion dollar between the three of them, as specified above.
Stakeholders who still do enter into a profit sharing agreement have, however, learned the lessons of their unfortunate predecessors, and do so on the basis of gross profit (as indeed tax authorities have always done), instead of net profits, as gross profit is determined by only charging directly assignable production costs to the revenues under accounting laws. And indeed, creator Roddenberry himself did not repeat the mistakes he made back in 1965 and 1978, when he signed a profit sharing deal with Paramount in 1986 for , where it was stipulated that he was to receive 35% of the adjusted gross profits derived from the series. 
Studios countered with transferring as much production unrelated expenditures to the (in)direct production costs as they possibly could get away with legally. Notorious in this respect is the transfer of the substantial executive bonuses, which, rightfully, should be paid from the net profits, to production overhead, from which regular salaries are paid. The even more savvy stakeholders will try to negotiate a gross revenue sharing, aka "box-office take", agreement, but this is, of course, vehemently opposed by Hollywood studios and is only reserved for the few very biggest and most powerful of the Hollywood stars, such as – who successfully reinitialized the Mission: Impossible franchise not only as the star, but as a co-producing company as well under which he receives his box-office takes – and which Roddenberry was most certainly not.
In regard to the Star Trek films, it is known that Paramount has charged incurred costs for undeveloped film projects against either the production budget, the overhead, or both of subsequent films that were realized, most notably The Motion Picture and The Undiscovered Country. While the act is in itself not illegal, it is a practice not commonly followed in most other industries (the pharmaceutical industry standing out as a notorious exception) and actually debatable from a business economics point of view; research and development costs of projects that do not come to fruition are usually written off and are commonly charged against the balance sheets of corporations. This is a sound generally accepted accounting principle for businesses (as stated in any business economics textbook and where the principles are known under their acronym ) as it prevents unwarranted cost price inflation with undue elements – thereby avoiding pollution of pre-production viability assessments – for products that do come to fruition. Paramount's divergent actions therefore can be construed as an instance of Hollywood accounting.
The very rare positive – as in inflating the profitability instead of the costs – applications of Hollywood accounting by the studio executive echelons in the cases of The Wrath of Khan and Generations were motivated by internal studio politics. In the former case the goal was to convince the outside world that Gene Roddenberry was a complete and utter failure as a film producer after his dismal performance on The Motion Picture, so that the studio seemed justified to sideline the Star Trek creator for any future project once and for all, (See also in this regard: The Motion Picture: Costs and revenues) whereas the latter case was intended to convince shareholders and investors that the Next Generation film franchise would potentially be as succesfull, or even more so, as the Original Crew film franchise had been. Both instances of positive Hollywood accounting succeeded admirably in their intended goals.
The 2006 separation of the Star Trek television and film productions under two newly-formed independent holding companies, resulting in that Paramount Pictures, now a holding of , had to pay licensing fees to newly-formed CBS Corporation in order to produce subsequent Star Trek (and Mission: Impossible ) films, aggravated the situation. A closely guarded trade secret, the amount of the fees were now a newly-added part to the production budget/overhead which was not there previously, and might partly explain the apparent lack of net profitability of the three alternate universe films. Some critics have surmised that this had been part of the split considerations all along, somewhat supported by the fact that both new entities have remained under the ultimate ownership and control of holding conglomerate National Amusements (NAI), and to an extent implicitly conceded as such in actuality by NAI owner and CEO Sumner Redstone, who had expressed his desire to "unlock value" by boosting stock value – for the CBS shareholders that is, not for those of (new) Viacom/Paramount, where the licensing issue is concerned – and earning potential of the at the time faster growing soon-to-be "new" Viacom. 
Incidentally, since NAI's core business is the operation of one of the largest chains of movie theaters in the USA, the fact that the costs they charged Paramount (which they own) for showing their productions appear in the Paramount's income statements as well, can also be construed as an instance of cost-price inflating Hollywood accounting.
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