Star Trek: Renegades is the most expensive Star Trek fan film produced so far. With a price-tag of $375K, their 90-minute pilot movie has generated 1.5 million YouTube views in just 9 months. The movie even had a red carpet premiere in Los Angeles last August with paparazzi and verteran Star Trek actors in the cast, including Walter Koenig, Tim Russ, and Robert Picardo.
Renegades held another Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign at the end of last year, looking to produce the first two single-hour episodes of their ongoing series. This 2-parter would feature Walter Koenig reprising his role of Pavel Chekov for one final time. Raising $378K, there was enough to film part 1, and fans assumed more crowd-funding campaigns would follow as the series continued.
But Renegades has just announced that the upcoming 2-parter will mark the culmination of their impressive fan series efforts.
Here is the announcement that was just e-mailed out to their previous backers:
To Our Supporters and Loyal Fans:
We are excited to officially announce that The Requiem will start shooting June 25th and we will wrap production on August 10th. With the shooting dates set and a locked script, we are now in active pre-production. As everything is coming together, we wanted to take this time to share with you some of our latest updates and what we have planned for Renegades.
As you know, our Kickstarter campaign only raised enough to meet our first goal of shooting episode 2 – not episode 3, and not post production. But, over the last few months, we’ve been diligently rewriting our script and stretching your donations in order to dramatically bring down the production costs so that we can film BOTH episodes – which we are now referring to as parts one and two of The Requiem. Here is what our director, Tim Russ and star Walter Koenig have to say about our script:
“The most recent draft of “STR -Requiem” knocked me out. Yup, it had me in tears. Congratulations!” –Walter Koenig.
“We’ve developed an exciting, emotional & surprising sequel to the Renegades pilot!” –Tim Russ
We’d also like to take this opportunity to make an announcement about the future of Renegades. Originally, Star Trek: Renegades was created with the hopes that CBS might consider it for a new web series, or perhaps as a flagship series for an on-demand channel. When CBS announced that they were in fact pursuing that strategy with their own in-house production, we decided it was time to conclude our series. That being said, this two-part episode of Renegades will be the last production of the series. This will be especially historic, as it will be Walter Koenig’s final performance as the beloved Chekov and we are excited and honored to give you the final leg of his journey.
We are very much looking forward to bringing back Chekov, Uhura, Tuvok and so many other beloved Star Trek characters for one more exciting adventure! We hope you are too.
We leave you with this sneak peek image of things to come…
Thank you,
The STR Team
(Graphic by Michael Pedro)