Tommy Kraft, creator of Star Trek–Horizon, on the virtual set of his film.

Crowdfunding and Axanar were the reasons CBS asked the Star Trek–Horizon sequel’s producer, Tommy Kraft, to cancel the production, he said.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Trek Geeks podcast released April 23, 2016, Kraft said CBS official Bill Burke told him other fan productions would be getting similar calls from CBS.

“Those were his words,” Kraft said: “‘This is directly a result of the legal trouble with the Axanar case.’”

Burke is senior vice-president of marketing at CBS Consumer Products, based in New York City. He leads marketing strategy for CBS Consumer Products properties.

Burke specifically tied the the fact Kraft was about to begin a $250,000 Kickstarter campaign to fund Federation Rising, his sequel to Star Trek–Horizon, Kraft said.

Kraft said Burke told him, “Legal … strongly suggest you do not pursue your plans for a sequel because we are aware you have plans to crowdfunding your sequel.”

Bill Burke, of CBS Consumer Products.

Since he made the cancelation announcement on the Horizon Facebook page earlier in the week, Star Trek fandom has been riven between those who blame Axanar’s intransigence in the face of its copyright lawsuit brought by CBS Studios and Paramount Pictures, and those who believe CBS is acting unfairly, Kraft said.

Despite Burke’s statement attributing its call on Horizon to the Axanar case, Axanar director Robert Meyer Burnett rejected the notion that his film’s alleged copyright infringement was behind the CBS move.

“Of course, Axanar is being blamed for this,” Burnett posted on his Facebook page. “Considering Paramount has Star Trek Beyond dropping in July and CBS has their new series streaming in January, perhaps Axanar isn’t to blame. Maybe THIS is the reason CBS put a stop to Tommy’s sequel.”

For his part, Axanar producer Alec Peters implied the Horizon shutdown was due to something the two productions had in common. “Horizon was a MOVIE, just like Axanar. Hmmmmmmm,” he wrote in response to Burnett’s Facebook post.

Kraft, however, rejected that notion. “I’ve tried from the beginning to maintain a neutral standpoint on this,” he said, “There have been a lot of productions that have raised a lot of money, and a lot of feature-length stuff, but it was something about the Axanar project in general, I believe, that caused them to have a change of opinion. … It’s too coincidental that everything was hunky dory until this one production and then all of a sudden things change.”

Kraft specifically noted Axanar’s branding itself as a “professional independent Star Trek production.” He told the podcasters:

The whole movie studio thing. … If 20th Century Fox were to come out and say we were going to make the first independent professional Star Trek production, there’s no way that would fly. CBS would have a C&D at their door in less than a day.

Axanar was essentially doing the same thing, Kraft said. “They were making a for profit business off of this, Ares [Studios], and calling it the first professional independent Star Trek production. They tried very hard to shirk the ‘fan film’ label and be viewed as a ‘real movie.’ I feel like a lot of that kind of stuff may have crossed the line.”

Axanar’s 1-2 million: At what point do you draw the line. “The Axanar case caused them reconsider where they were going to draw the line.”

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