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In a hundred years from now, when some bespectacled historian sits down to write the story of the G.I. Joe film franchise, the first sentence he’ll write will be, “Why did Paramount Pictures want so badly to get rid of Channing Tatum?” Then he’ll underline that sentence about a hundred different times, crinkle the whole page up into a ball, and throw that ball back into his desk drawer. In hindsight, he’s got a lot of movies to write about and it wasn’t the brightest idea to start with G.I. Joe.

The tough thing about using someone else’s ideas to make money is that it’s not entirely legal. This lesson had to be learned the hard way this past weekend by Alec Peters, producer of an independent film titled Prelude to Axanar. The Star Trek fan film drew quite a bit of ire from copyright holders Paramount after a crowdfunding effort on Indiegogo brought this grassroots DIY production over half a million dollars last summer. The promise to make a “studio-quality” film including characters, settings, and other elements from the heavily-licensed Star Trek franchise with no engagement from the relevant studio spelled doom for the Axanar team, and now the chickens have come home to roost.

In the mad scramble for new revenue from established brands, studios will reboot anything. They’ll reboot superheroes, reboot America’s childhood, they’ll even reboot John McClane. But now, Paramount has announced a plan to capitalize on the strongest brand in the history of recorded time by rebooting the word of God himself.

Star Trek’s rebooted cinematic tenure under J.J. Abrams has led to diminishing returns, Star Trek 3 just barely making it off the ground, leading many to wonder when Gene Roddenberry’s iconic franchise might return to its TV roots. That time may already be upon us, CBS is reportedly looking to boldly go forward with a new TV Star Trek.