It looks like the beef between Paramount and CBS over the rights to the Star Trek franchise isn't quite over - that is, when it comes to airing time. Apparently, Bryan Fuller's digital-only reboot of the new incarnation of Star Trek will not be able to air until six months after Star Trek Beyond makes its debut in theaters, and you can chock it all up to that pesky little thing called marketing.
CBS Corp. President Les Moonves elaborated on the gap between the upcoming film and the upcoming series at the Deutsch Bank 2016 Media, Internet & Telecom Conference on March 8, referencing CBS' split with Paramount in 2006. (For the uninitiated, here's a breakdown of what this means: because of the split, CBS Corp. has show rights while Paramount has rights to characters and merch. All in all, it means that there can be some pretty tough negotiations at play when two different media corporations are vying to eke out what they can from the same business venture.)
"When [CBS] split from Viacom 10 years ago, January 1, 2006, one of the big sticking points, as you can imagine, was Star Trek. You know, we both wanted it," said Moonves. "They said 'It's a movie!' and I said, 'No, no, no, it's a TV show.' Actually, we're both right. So they kept the feature film rights, we kept the television rights; they have [Star Trek Beyond] coming out July 22."
"Our deal with them is that we had to wait six months after their film is launched so there wouldn't be a confusion in the marketplace," he added.
This also gives us a bit of insight into how both the movie and the TV show are interrelated - which is to say, they're not. Moonves' clear delineation between the television show rights and the movie rights seems to harken back to the press release for the TV series when it was announced this past November, which more or less underlined in red it that it was "not related to Star Trek Beyond."
Star Trek Beyond is set to be released in theaters on July 22.
Check out the trailer for Star Trek Beyond in the video clip below.
