The Internet Finds One More Reason to Complain About Star Trek Into Darkness

Having been voted the worst Star Trek film of all time by a group of fans at a convention, Star Trek Into Darkness has made more money in unadjusted dollars than any other film in the franchise at the worldwide box office and scored a "Certified Fresh" 87% rating at the review-aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. It's also got 91% audience approval. Of course, you'd never know any of the good stuff by reading our comment threads, or many others around the Internet. There's a passionate hate for this movie that's hard to understand if you're not part of it. Those 9% negative reviews are passionate, and vocal, and everywhere. Certainly it's easy to just lay that on fans who don't like change--and that's what some supporters of the movie have done--but that's probably reductive. Man of Steel and Iron Man 3 evoked similar responses, so perhaps it's just a question of people who get heavily invested in these massive blockbusters before they're in theaters and then react negatively when their expectations or hopes for the film are dashed.

Whatever it is, Paramount have made another move that seems calculated to create as much backlash as possible toward Star Trek Into Darkness. The Blu-ray.

The official release of the Star Trek Into Darkness Blu-ray comes next week and features seven mini-featurettes--about 45 minutes of behind-the-scenes bonus material and the like, but no deleted scenes, commentary or any of the other goodies that are generally associated with this kind of major release.

Bizarrely, it turns out that content was created--but Paramount has divided them up and handed them out piecemeal to retail partners, meaning that the studios have given exclusive bonus content to the Target release, the Best Buy release, and the iTunes download. There are also CinemaNow and Vudu-exclusive content, but that may or may not "count," since CinemaNow is operated by Best Buy and Vudu is Wal-Mart's Ultraviolet arm. Since all of the Blu-ray combo packs come with an Ultraviolet copy, that Vudu content may not look as "exclusive" as you first believed when all is said and done.

The bottom line, though, is that fans looking to enjoy all of the available special features will have to buy at least three separate versions of the film, ultimately paying around $60.

This isn't entirely unheard-of--Marvel's The Avengers divvied up a number of featurettes and let both Target and Wal-Mart have "exclusive" content attached to the Blu-ray combo packs in their respective stores (Target had a disc looking at building the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Wal-Mart had a Peter David-written graphic novel). Still, that disc was pretty feature-rich to begin with and the exclusive bonus content was more like the cherry on top of the sundae. Here, they've taken bits of whipped cream and banana out of the sundae and strategically scattered them around in the hopes that people will buy enough ice cream to make themselves sick on it.

Sorry, that metaphor clearly went on too long.