Bend over Trekkers, here comes Paramount to lighten your wallets once again.  Not content with charging roughly double the going rate for every season of every iteration of the various Star Trek TV series (see "DVD Round-Up: 'Star Trek Enterprise'"), the studio is playing games with the Blu-ray release of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness that could have hardcore fans shelling out extra bucks as they chase "extra" features that have been doled out to various big retailers as "exclusives."
 
Unlike the situation with the Star Trek TV series, there is no way Paramount can charge very much of a premium for the Star Trek movies without risking a major loss in sales (though it should come as no surprise that the price for the Blu-ray of Into Darkness is at the upper end of single film releases at an MSRP of $39.99 for the standard Blu-ray edition).  But just charging $5 above the standard Blu-ray price is evidently not enough for Paramount.  As Digital Bits editor Bill Hunt discovered when he reviewed the Blu-ray of Star Trek Into Darkness, "more than half of the special features created for Star Trek Into Darkness were used by Paramount’s marketing team as retailer exclusives."
 
With an ordinary film that appeals to regular movie fans this would not have been such a big deal, but Star Trek fans tend to be tech savvy and obsessively interested in the behind-the-scenes processes that go into creating the shows and movies they like.  Their interest and devotion is rewarded by a series of cheap ploys designed to get them to pay over and over again for what they should receive the first time.
 
By comparing the German release with the American version Digital Bits discovered that the missing content on U.S. wide-release Blu-rays includes 5 featurettes ("The Journey Continues," "Rebuilding the Enterprise," "Full of Wrath," "Kirk and Spock," and "Visual Preferences").  The missing extras are spread around to various retailers, so, for example, Target and Best Buy each have 30 minutes of exclusive content, and if you want to hear 2 hours of commentaries from J.J. Abrams and Co., you will have download the film from iTunes.
 
Of course there also remains the possibility that Paramount will release some sort of "anniversary" or "holiday" edition of the film in the future that will include all the extras (the Blu-ray discs certainly have the capacity to hold all of them) just to tempt fans to buy the film yet again.