As in, making sure that the copyright holders of Blade Runner won’t mind them raising money to make a twenty-five minute Slice of Life movie. Let’s not have another Axanar, shall we? The last one caused a lot of hurt feelings, all around.
Continue reading One hopes that the ‘Slice of Life’ people learned from Axanar’s mistake.
Executive summary: the Axanar people admitted that they didn’t have permission, that they violated copyright rules, that they’re going to make significant changes to Axanar, and that all future shows that they do will conform to CBS/Paramount’s ‘Guidelines for Fan Films.’ Continue reading CBS/Paramount settles on Axanar lawsuit.
Short version? Well, the Star Trek: Axanar fan film folks got hit by a copyright infringement suit by Paramount – and, I will be honest, here: speaking as a backer of the project I wasn’t happy to find out that they didn’t get permission from Paramount first, because you need to get permission for this sort of thing for precisely this reason – and JJ Abrams is now saying that he’s gotten Paramount to maybe back down. Abrams is of course the executive producers, and he’s apparently joined in this with Justin Lin, who directed the latest Star Trek flick (Star Trek: Beyond). If you’re a cynic, you may be of the opinion that Paramount is not so much seeing the light as they are the bottom line. Paramount would rather like Beyond to make lots of money, please.
Still: it would be nice if we can get this Axanar mess resolved. The concept (Garth of Izar and a Klingon-Federation war!) is awesome and we were unlikely to get it otherwise. Plus, it never hurts to remind people that it’s getting easier and easier to make movies.
Via… everybody, really. But I’ll give @emccoy_writer the credit because I saw her Tweet first.
I have to admit: I assumed that they had the rights to do a Star Trek movie. If I had known that they had not, I probably wouldn’t have kicked in money to fund the project. I only say ‘probably’ because I recognize that there are indeed numerous gentleman’s agreements going on out there between studios and fan groups, and that it may have indeed been reasonable for the Axanar project people to assume that CBS and Paramount would green-light their fan movie project.
But CBS and Paramount have not, and Star Trek is in point of fact their intellectual property. My personal opinion on how those companies should exercise their property rights is thus automatically trumped by the opinion of the companies themselves. And I wouldn’t expect this movie to get made any time soon, either…
Moe Lane
PS: I don’t know if I’m going to try to get my money back. Doing so may require more effort and lifespan than I’m prepared to spend on the effort. But I’m still not happy.
You may remember this project from earlier:
…they’re essentially building a feature film from the ground up. And more or less out of nothing: their first Kickstarter got the twenty minute film you see above. The second Kickstarter got them the funds to build a film studio. Now they’re raising money via Indegogo to actually make the film itself. I just dropped a few bucks in the kitty there myself.
Via Ed Driscoll over at Instapundit.
Moe Lane
PS: By the way, if Kerry and Kevin Conran ever read this: guys, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow was AWESOME. Especially the way that you got the robots to move properly.
Saw this via Facebook:
It was a Kickstarter that I somehow missed; it looks pretty danged spiffy. Basically, it’s going to be a documentary narrating a key moment in the early history of the United Federation of Planets (pre-TOS); I look forward to watching the final version.
