We’re about three weeks away from the next corporate earnings reports from CBS Corporation and Viacom — who each own part of the overall Star Trek franchise — and this time, the long-rumored merger between the two media giants may really be happening… with a little help to a franchise you may be familiar with.
Here at TrekCore we’ve been watching the on-again-off-again rumors and business reports about a potential corporate joining between CBS, who owns Trek on television and the majority of related franchise holdings, and Viacom, who through Paramount Pictures owns the rights to Star Trek film development (and the back catalog of features from 1979’s The Motion Picture to 2016’s Star Trek Beyond).
The two companies, as many of you know, broke apart shortly after the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005, ultimately resulting in the Kelvin Timeline series of films starring Chris Pine and company. Now, it seems that we may be on the cusp of formal announcements as The Hollywood Reporter now says that August 8 may be the day Star Trek fans have been waiting for.
In 2005, the parents of Star Trek divorced, with CBS winning custody of the TV shows while Viacom got the film franchise, courtesy of its Paramount Pictures. It’s all but certain, though, that a reconciliation is in the works and an announcement of their intended reunification, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter, is due Aug. 8, the day each is set to report quarterly earnings.
And this time, Star Trek seems to be one of the many driving factors in bringing the two companies back under one corporate roof: turning Trek back into a unified film-and-television franchise in the days of the record-shattering Marvel Cinematic Universe and ever-growing Star Wars landscape — each Disney properties, tearing up Hollywood’s competition — along with the massive expansion of streaming content being developed for consumers is a no-brainer, and THR‘s sources agree:
Some insiders — only on deep background, but with a straight face — say that putting Star Trek back under one roof is, indeed, one important reason to reunite Viacom with CBS, much like Disney has worked hard to keep as many Marvel characters as possible in its singular House of Mouse. For that matter, Mission: Impossible also could use some continuity, as Viacom has the films while CBS ran the original series from 1966 to 1973.
Broadly speaking, the industrywide shift to streaming is driving the need for CBS and Viacom to merge: CBS needs more content to feed All Access and its Showtime direct-to-consumer products in order to chase Netflix, Amazon and Hulu and to keep pace with Disney, WarnerMedia and Apple, each of which has its own Netflix competitor in the works.
The THR report goes on to break down the compatibility of the two companies — each having strenghts the other lacks, and how CBS’s financial assets would lead them to be the the one to buy Viacom out — and notes that this would also bring Nickelodeon (currently a Viacom holding) into CBS management, which would be a boon to the forthcoming kids’ Star Trek series destined for that cable network.
It also would likely resolve the revolving door of finding your favorite Star Trek films on streaming services, and the combination of the two companies would allow CBS All Access to immediately grow into an over-the-top source for all of Paramount’s massive film library.
While this may end up being a good thing for Star Trek fans — and it’s something to be hopeful for on that front, of course — any merger between the two media giants would still result in likely redundancies in the resulting ‘new CBS’, though hopefully not to the scale of the massive round of 4,000 layoffs seen in the recent Disney-Fox buyout earlier this year.
We’ll keep you posted on all the latest developments on the CBS-Viacom situation as things move along, so keep your sensors locked at TrekCore for news as it breaks!