Paramount+ has been the exclusive streaming home for all 13 Star Trek feature films, but that changed at the beginning of 2024. If you’re in the USA and want to stream one of the TOS (The Original Series) or TNG (The Next Generation) movies, you’ll now have to do it on Max.
As of January 1, 2024, the six TOS-era Star Trek movies—The Motion Picture, The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, The Voyage Home, The Final Frontier, and The Undiscovered Country—along with the four TNG-era movies—Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis—are streaming exclusively on Max in the USA. This includes the new 4K Director’s Edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Additionally, these Star Trek feature films have started airing on HBO.
This isn’t the first time the Star Trek movies have made such a move. In November 2022, the same 10 movies jumped from Paramount+ to HBO Max (now just Max), only to return to Paramount+ in July 2023. However, the three Kelvin-era movies—Star Trek (2009), Into Darkness, and Beyond—remain available on Paramount+.
It’s currently unknown how long HBO and Max will hold the exclusive license for these 10 Star Trek feature films. Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery are in talks about a potential merger, but the licensing deal for the Star Trek films is not related to those discussions.
All 13 Star Trek feature films were first consolidated exclusively on Paramount+ in November 2021. By July 2022, all five “classic” Star Trek TV shows were also exclusive to Paramount+ in the USA. During the height of the streaming wars, most media companies kept their content on their own streaming services. However, there’s been a recent industry trend back to licensing content to other platforms.
Warner Bros. Discovery, for instance, has been licensing much of its content to other streaming services, including Netflix. This shift back to more licensing has already been seen with Star Trek: Prodigy moving from Paramount+ to Netflix. We might see more exclusive and non-exclusive licensing deals for Star Trek TV shows in the future. Paramount might even consider producing a new original Star Trek show for another service. There is some precedent for this, as Netflix covered much of the cost for the early seasons of Discovery for international streaming rights. Amazon did the same for Picard and Lower Decks.
One thing is clear: Paramount+ will need to update their latest “Home of Star Trek” promo, released during Comic-Con 2023, as it includes clips from the feature films.
Source: TrekMovie.com
