Star Trek Beyond/Release/Reception

Forbes magazine argued that Paramount should have given the film a lower budget: "The thing that made [Beyond] most appealing to the fans, that it played like a smaller-scale 50th anniversary homage to the spirit and tone of the original show, was the thing that arguably doomed it in terms of blockbuster success. Star Trek Beyond was what its fans wanted it to be. There is value in that over the long run. But Paramount and friends need to realize that Star Trek is never going to be a Guardians of the Galaxy-level success and plan accordingly." The Forbes commentary touched upon the circumstance that while "old guard" Star Trek fans did show up at the theaters, "new", and non-fans alike failed to do so, they at the time being offered a plethora of apparently more attractive (block buster) alternatives, those stemming from The Walt Disney Company by then owned properties in particular. These not only included the cited Guardians of the Galaxy and others from the film franchise, but the productions from the in the meantime revived rival Star Wars franchise as well, as detailed in a later Forbes editorial. 
Additionally, the alternate reality film franchise had started to cause a rift between the "old guard" fanbase and newcomers to the franchise, with the former expressing their reservations about the alternate reality (re)incarnation, especially for its lack of "the Roddenberry factor", as Star Trek production staff veteran Doug Drexler had put it, but which was present in Beyond, courtesy Director Justin Lin and Writer Simon Pegg, making it the trio's best received one by the [old guard] fanbase. Whereas newcomers on the other hand had flocked to the first two action packed films, precisely because it was fast paced fun and in line with similar fare offered to them by other franchises which catered to the current tastes of contemporary cinema goers (being coined "fun, popcorn movies" by former Star Trek production staffer Roger Lay, Jr. ), they apparently deemed Beyond as "too Trekkie" to their tastes. 
Simon Pegg commented two years after the film's release that Paramount had poorly marketed the film, stating they had waited too long to release a full trailer and that they were afraid of mentioning the 50th anniversary. He also expressed anger at how the teaser ruined the use of "Sabotage" in the movie. Pegg did not deviate from his opinions as he reiterated them in March 2020 to IndieWire in an even more outspoken fashion. Incidentally, the studio appeared to have deemed the film "too Trekkie" as well, explaining their marketing decisions regarding the heavy emphasis on action and fun, as related above. Furthermore, Pegg himself came by and large to agree with the Forbes assessment when he at a later point in time – in the process expressing his own personal doubt on the continued existence of the alternate reality and/or the film franchise as a whole for that matter – stated to Collider,
"The fact is, the appeal of Star Trek is slightly more niche than the appeal of, say, the Marvel movies, which make huge amounts of money, and have this really, really broad appeal and they do very well. I think Star Trek is just a little bit more niche, so it isn’t gonna hit those kind of numbers. So yes, the obvious thing to do would be to not go for that massive spectacle, go for something a little bit more restrained in the vein of the original series. Yes, that would be a brilliant thing to do, and I’m sure it probably has been discussed… You specialize a little bit more. (...) Maybe TV is a better place for [Star Trek] now. Television has evolved so much. It's become something which is very much a contemporary, a peer of cinema. It's simply viewed in a different way. It isn't a reduced scope anymore. You can still do masses of interesting things, and it can still look modern and not inexpensive. Maybe television is a better format for Star Trek. That's where it started, you know." 
What Beyond, or rather its poor box office performance, had abundantly and conclusively demonstrated though, was that the reliance on the traditional Star Trek fanbase alone for a motion picture production to become financially viable, was not enough due its relatively small numerical size of potential cinema visitors, especially from the 1990s onward when production costs exploded from double to triple digit millions of dollars, and arguably never had been. Any new Star Trek motion picture production, be it a film or a television production, especially those conceived from the 1990s onward, needed to attract a viewership that extended well beyond "Trekdom" alone, and which was something Paramount was actually already acutely aware of since Berman-era Star Trek. (A Vision of the Future - Star Trek: Voyager, pp. 139-140) It is this circumstance in particular that explained the ponderous and sluggish development of a projected fifteenth film; Paramount needs a film that is appealing to an audience as broad as possible, the aforementioned Forbes admonishment notwithstanding – hence the resurfacing of the "too Trekkie" qualifier in regard to that projected film.
:*See also in this regard: Star Trek films – Gross vs net profitability