While Donald J. Trump was being inaugurated as the forty fifth president of the United States, CBS and Paramount decided to settle their thirteen month long lawsuit with embattled fan producer Alec Peters and his production company Axanar Productions. For a good long while the major Hollywood studios had argued that Peters had flagrantly abused the trust they had placed in the fans who were creating their own works of fiction. Many had come and many had gone from this arena while some were still around making cracking episodes and raising funds through crowd funding means.
But Peters went one step further, he asked for money then made a proof of concept that wasn’t like the big picture that he had in mind, before asking for more money to make a feature film, Star Trek: Axanar, he had said, was going to be a professional, independent Star Trek production. After collecting over one million dollars, Alec decided that he needed to retrofit a warehouse into a sound stage and some production offices to establish a studio for hire. After spending all of the donor money without making the feature he had promised, CBS and Paramount filed a joint lawsuit against the man who had ostracized those once closest to him during the making of Prelude.
Very early on the battle lines were drawn, and for many devout followers you were either with them or against them. Following The Trekzone Spotlight with Alec Peters I was declared a ‘hater’ and hurled with no end of abuse, there was even fracturing amongst the ‘haters’ as different perspectives on reporting this on going saga were hashed out, often in very public circumstances. But now that we have come to the end of this sorry saga, it’s time to sing kumbaya and get on with loving what we love – Star Trek.
In the coming days, as the dust settles, I’ll be interviewing Eriq Gardner from The Hollywood Reporter who filed this report about the case and also checking in with long time contributor Carlos Pedraza from Axamonitor for an abbreviated version of what was going to be our trial coverage. Stay tuned for those through TREKZONE.org on Twitter and Facebook.
