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We are still arguing behind the scenes about who has to watch Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and review it. There doesn’t seem to be much urgency, though, as nobody else has watched it either. The show had a debut where the entire first episode was launched, for free, on YouTube. Star Trek threw a party, and nobody came.
Mark your calendars, Trekkies. 15th January 2026 is the day that Star Trek officially died, killed by Paramount and Alex Kurtzman and a team that may have never seen an episode of the show before they took over. If they did, it looks like they didn’t understand it.
Despite strong early reviews, these numbers should send shockwaves through Paramount. Nobody wants to be standing in this spot as a spurned David Ellison stalks the corridors in a post-Warner Bros rage.
Starfleet Academy was released free for a YouTube premiere as part of a big launch, and it garnered a peak live viewership of… 1,300 concurrent viewers.
11 hours after release, 16,000 people had seen it. To put that into perspective, our own Last Movie Outpost Overlooked series of video articles has 2.5 times more views than that. 16,000 viewers is lower engagement than a mid-tier fan upload talking about Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.
This is indicative of a show with zero buzz, zero momentum, zero in-built core fanbase, and zero ability to find a new one. Genuinely, there are no words that can describe how catastrophic this is for Paramount. This is broadly unspinnable by any PR department. Paramount will have to consider ripping up those already signed contracts for the second season. There is no other way.
This is the last stage of the chickens coming home to roost. This is the end, the final destination, the outcome of all of their terrible decisions around this franchise.
They decided that they knew better than millions of dedicated fans and decades of established lore. They decided they needed to take the franchise on a hunt for a new audience, alienating the old one in the process. Current year thinking, millennial moronism, and fragile Gen-Z pandering all failed to find this new audience that simple common sense could have told them didn’t exist.
So this is it. Yet another franchise lies dead. The handling of these premier-tier properties by idiots incapable of overseeing a coffee break, let alone a multi-million dollar IP, has been a disaster of New Coke proportions, or Gillette’s misandrist and racist attack on its core customer base.
Writers’ rooms full of HR department escapees, showrunners spending too much time in their own echo chambers, and studio heads fearful of a noisy minority have brought us here. They made the pool full of effluent that they now have to roll around in. Hope they enjoy it. And unemployment.
The post STAR TREK: STARFLEET ACADEMY Bombs Hard appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
