But where are those fans? They’ve been laving the franchise in droves since about the second season of TNG, many getting sick of the Berman junk, others just getting old and dying.
Check out the links below. The first one is the revenue picture of the movies, the second is the ratings up through 1999, the final is Enterprise ratings so it takes us from 2001 through 2005.
http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/series/StarTrek.php
http://www.treknation.com/articles/ratings_history.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Enterprise
What you see in this is pretty constant decline in revenue across the board. The movies had some occasional bumps, but long Janeway showed up Trek was losing its license to print money, the momentum was disappearing, and by 2005 gone. “Oprafication” probably had something to do with it, but baggage has a lot to do with it too. Here’s an interesting sentence I found on Wiki “The six television series comprise a total of 716 episodes - 10 of which are feature-length - across 23 seasons (30 when counting seasons that aired concurrently).” That makes over 700 hours of canon TV, plus another 20 odd hours for the movies. That’s a daunting back story for new fans to get into, and it’s a lot of opportunities to drive away old fans.
That’s where the reboot comes in, all stuff, some of which is good, much isn’t, goes away. It’s a fresh start to draw in new fans, hopefully satisfy the old (and from what I’ve seen it mostly has), and to drop the writer’s bible down to something actually useful.
Wiping away an entire history - even a fictional one - does not satisfy this fan. I’d been happier if they just had new actors take over and run some new missions in the 4th and 5th years of the original Five Year Mission.
The end product here reeked of McBlockbuster... tons of CGI, explosions, tissue thin plot and character development.