Star Trek Movie Curse

"Sure as day follows night, sure as eggs is eggs, sure as every odd-numbered Star Trek movie is shit."

—Tim Bisley, played by Simon Pegg, who starred in the eleventh Star Trek movie, and noted the irony.

Various Star Trek series have collected various groups within Trek fandom: Some will love a particular series, some will gush about almost anything to do with Star Trek at all, and some will vocally express their rabid dislike of a particular movie or series, and present a laundry-list of reasons why it's the worst of the lot.

And then there's the Star Trek Movie Curse.

In a nutshell, the Trek feature films have followed a peculiar pattern: even-numbered Star Trek films have always done extremely well at the box office (with the exception of Nemesis). Odd-numbered films, on the other hand, have either failed miserably or still succeeded, but had a few glaring flaws that kept it from that coveted "top spot".

So far, the only films exempted from Curse are the tenth and eleventh, as 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis sucked while 2009's Star Trek was a hit, contrary to their position in the series. It is unknown whether this anomaly means the Curse has actually been broken, or merely inverted.

Two commonly proposed methods to realign the curse with "reality" are using the sum of the digits as an indicator, or alternatively including the Affectionate Parody Galaxy Quest as a Star Trek movie, inserting it between 9 (Insurrection) and 10 (Nemesis), as put by Sam Hughes. Another theory states that Nemesis wasn't good because it was a multiple of five, and like Star Trek V, was So Bad It's Horrible. This is followed by the excuse that Star Trek doesn't follow the pattern because of the interference of time-traveling Romulans—besides, it wasn't made by the same crew as the rest. A third theory says that, because of Star Trek's departure from established canon and lack of any apparent message, it is "bad", and it (at least) follows the theory.

Some have also taken to referring the reboot film as "Star Trek 0," thus placing it in an arguably even spot.

Ominously, all of these "patches" to account for the curse failing twice in a row predict that Star Trek XII (the sequel to the reboot film) will be bad. If the film turns out to be good, then either the curse is well and truly broken, or it has been reset to the classic odd-bad, even-good paradigm. Or even more elaborate theories will need to be developed to account for it.

Michael Demtschyna, as noted above, along with SF Debris, have suggested the alternate theory that the movie is bad when any of the main characters sing. These are The Final Frontier, Generations, Insurrection, and Nemesis (with Chuck snarking that Star Trek the Motion Picture doesn't contain singing only because it would distract from the boredom).

Currently, Blu-Ray Disc collectors can buy the even-numbered movies and reboot individually, while the odd-numbered movies are only available in box sets of Star Trek films.

Interestingly, the Indiana Jones franchise seems to be the opposite; odd-numbered movies (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) do well, while even-numbered movies (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) are nowhere near as good.

In addition, the odd-numbered Beethoven symphonies are the classics (3, 5, 7, and 9. 1, not so much), whereas the evens don't get as much attention.