Paramount Pictures/History with Star Trek/Post-TNG productions

The late Brandon Tartikoff, now chairman of Paramount Pictures from to , during The Next Generations fifth and sixth seasons, was deeply impressed with the success of the six (at the time) Star Trek films and The Next Generation, and it was he, in a complete reversal of the position he had six years earlier, who initiated and authorized the creation of a third live-action Star Trek series to launch into syndication, . (Trek: The Unauthorized Behind-The-Scenes Story of The Next Generation; DS9 Season 1 DVD-special feature, "A Bold New Beginning")
However, him ordering a third live-action Star Trek television series, entailed far more than just doing that. The Next Generation Executive Producer Rick Berman had recounted that he had a series of meetings with Tartikoff, starting in the summer of 1991. As a former television network executive, Tartikoff was acutely aware that even the most successful series had a limited, economical lifespan for a variety of reasons, ranging from psychological cast fatigue, through naturally increasing production costs – if only for the annually inflation adjusted production staff wages as ordained by the Hollywood Unions, and not in the least for star cast salaries habitually inflating exponentially with each sequel – to increased competition with itself for scarce syndication time slots the longer a series runs. Together with Berman, Tartikoff decided upon an optimum Star Trek series run of seven seasons, meaning that The Next Generation had at that time only three seasons left to go. Though enamored with the Original Crew movies, Tartikoff was well aware that they too had run their course, if only for the age of the cast, but figured this was the perfect time to pass the baton to "the next generation", thereby starting a new Star Trek movie franchise. He instructed Berman to start looking into that, and have a movie ready at the end of The Next Generation television series (by which time the new Deep Space Nine series had to be up and running for two seasons), preferably one in which, one way or another, featured the transition of the Original Crew to The Next Generation Crew. Given his marching orders, Berman was sent on his way to his most daunting year in his career, 1994. For all intents and purposes, it was Tartikoff who had come up with the leap-frogging seven-season format of the modern Star Trek television franchise, and the start of The Next Generation movie franchise, though he had to leave the actual production start in February 1993 and oversight of what was to become the first Next Generation film, , to his immediate successor Sherry Lansing, due to his premature departure. (Star Trek Movie Memories, 1995, pp. 399-403; Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Continuing Mission, pp. 154-157; )
Voyager itself was actually conceived to serve as the flagship of Paramount's second attempt of operating a television network, established in 1994 as United Paramount Network (UPN) by Lucie Salhany and her superior Kerry McCluggage. Salhany had previously been recruited in 1991 by Barry Diller to head the by him established Fox Broadcasting Company, but returned in 1994 to Paramount to succeed where her former boss had failed back in 1977. Unlike its unsuccessful 1977 predecessor, UPN fared somewhat better, only ceasing to exist in 2006, after it had aired the fifth live action Star Trek series, .
It was in this period of time that the most successful film set in the prime universe was released in 1996, , even surpassing, both in critical as well as financial terms, the two hitherto most successful and beloved ones, The Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home (see Star Trek films: Performance summary). It was only in hindsight that it became clear that First Contact represented the high water mark of what was then still called "The Franchise".