Has fan LOVE turned 765874: UNIFICATION into an “OPEN SOURCE” fan film?

Sometimes a fan filmmaker produces a fan film that inspires a completely different fan filmmaker to produce something—be it a tribute, continuation, or some other expansion of the original—based in whole or in part on the original work. This has come to be known as “a fan film of a fan film.”

The term was first coined in 2016 with the release of PRELUDE TO AX’D -WE-ARE, the STALLED TREK animated puppet parody of both PRELUDE TO AXANAR and the subsequent copyright infringement lawsuit filed jointly by CBS and Paramount against AXANAR PRODUCTIONS and ALEC PETERS.

Granted, such projects are very rare. Indeed, only INTERLUDE, THE ICARUS MANEUVER, and THE FEDERATION FILES‘ “The Equinox Effect” and “Friends and Foes” come to mind for me. And the former two were more expansions of an existing fan film “universe” of characters and settings, and the latter two were GLEN L. WOLFE’s attempt to complete unfinished fan films so their partial footage could finally be released for fans to see.

All of this is to say that there aren’t many “fan films of fan films” in the Star Trek genre. But over this past weekend, we got our newest entry: PROLOGUE TO UNIFICATION from SAMUEL COCKINGS of Great Britain, the showrunner behind the TREK SHORTS fanthology series of fan films. As the title suggests, this release is meant to lead into the recent 765874: UNIFICATION from OTOY with involvement from WILLIAM SHATNER, the estate of LEONARD NIMOY, and THE RODDENBERRY ARCHIVE. In case you’re one of the four Trek fans on the planet who hasn’t seen this jaw-dropping, cutting-edge love letter to Star Trek yet, watch it now…

And now, take a look at what Sam Cockings was able to put together in the span of just three weeks based on OTOY’s fan film…

Oh! Before I go on, I need to make a disclaimer about my use of the term “fan film.” Technically, 765874: Unification isn’t a standard fan film. It was an approved production, licensed by Paramount Global to OTOY as a way of generating original Star Trek content for the new Apple Vision Pro VR headset. So calling 765874: Unification a “fan film” isn’t entirely accurate. On the other hand, it was not produced by either Paramount or CBS Studios…and it was obviously made by fans with a knowledge of and loyalty to long-established Star Trek canon.

So what is it? Much like the “uncanny valley” in early CG renderings of human faces (like Princess Leia at the end of Star Wars: Rogue One), 765874: Unification walks in two worlds without truly fitting into either. So rather than calling Sam’s latest project a “fan film of a licensed-non-studio-produced-but-still professional-quality-Star-Trek-vignette-CGI-film-made-by-fans-with-fans-in-mind,” I’m going to call it a “fan film of a fan film.” Feel free to argue.

But Sam’s wasn’t the only fan video effort to be “inspired” by 765874: Unification. Indeed, within a week of its release on November 17, 2024, “fan edits” were popping up like tribbles at a buffet table. A fan-edit takes the source material and re-cuts it to be similar-but-different from the original, possibly better, possibly shorter (or longer), possibly with different music…whatever the fan editor wants to do. Unlike Sam, who re-used only one shot from the original: the time-and-dimension-hopping character of Yor), fan-edits take most or even all of the original and just rearrange the puzzle pieces, sometimes adding pieces that were never in the original to begin with. There aren’t really any hard-and-fast rules.

Fan-edits are actually much more common than fan films of fan films. Indeed, there is a whole dark web area reserved for fan-edits of everything from Star Trek to Star Wars to Lord of the Rings. Some fans have tried to edit The Hobbit down from three movies to just one—with mixed results. One Trekker who contacted me a few years ago had spent several months cutting the ten episodes of STAR TREK: PICARD‘s first season down to just a pair of two-hour movies (it was surprisingly good!).

The reasons I don’t typically cover fan-edits, despite the obvious hard work that goes into many of them, are: 1) their legality is seriously questionable (and there are no “fan-edit guidelines,” and 2) they aren’t particularly easy to find (mainly because of point #1). They typically don’t get uploaded to YouTube (although, if you search for “fan edit,” there are a bunch of Star Wars videos that come up, but they’re usually the shorter cuts.) Once found, the longer fan-edited videos often require long downloads of huge files. And honestly, for me personally, while I am occasionally impressed by the skill and quality of the fan-edits, they take a lot of time to watch. And in the end, for better or worse, the original movie or TV series was edited the way it was edited. And I’m okay with that.

Which brings us to the second half of this blog, the fan-edits of 765874: Unification…

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The first fan-edit I saw was posted to YouTube on November 24, just a week after OTOY premiered their film, on a channel called Daydreaming with 233 subscribers. You can view it, if you wish, below and compare it to the original…

It was an interesting take. The fan-editor added Kirk’s death scene from Star Trek Generations at the beginning of the edit, trimmed out all of the J.M. Colt footage, most of the Gary Mitchell footage (why not all…or none?), but added in some footage of the recovery of the Enterprise-D saucer section from the previous OTOY release 765874: REGENERATION (watch it here). The edit also features music from Star Trek Beyond at the end instead of the film’s original score.

What I found most amusing was the following text placed in the video description: “Fair Use Disclaimer Under Section 107 Copyright Act 1976.” I chuckled when I read that. It’s kind of like wearing a garlic necklace just in case you meet a vampire—or more realistically, walking around a dangerous neighborhood at night wearing a T-shirt that says, “Don’t attack me because I know karate!” Now, it’s very possible that you’ll make it out of that neighborhood with no trouble at all. But if a gang of punks does decide to mug you or rough you up, I’m sorry to say that T-shirt ain’t gonna make any difference.

Now, I wish that invoking Fair Use and the Copyright Act of 1976 were enough to protect fan films and fan-edits. But if that were really the case, the Axanar copyright lawsuit would never have been filed or would have quickly been thrown out of court because—like magic, POOF!—Fair Use disclaimer. But things don’t work like that. This fan-edit not only uses the vast majority of the footage from the copyrighted 765874: Unification but also footage from ST Generations without permission of either copyright holder. Fair Use requires the accused to demonstrate that they used only the minimum amount of intellectual property necessary for either critical commentary, parody, or some educational purpose. Fan-edits typically don’t qualify as any of the above trio of uses. Simply saying, “This is how I would have edited it differently…” isn’t going to hold up in court as either critical commentary or educational in nature.

That said, none of the 765874: Unification fan-edits has yet to be challenged by the I.P. holders or taken down from YouTube, although that could always change. However, my personal belief is that it won’t (at least not in the short term). I suspect Paramount and CBS won’t be aggressively going after Star Trek fan-edits (or fan films) until the new owners, Skydance, decides how they want to handle potential infringement by fans. The old guard at Paramount was concerned enough to eventually sue one fan filmmaker, privately contact a few others, and finally issue fan film guidelines in 2016. Since then, however, Paramount/CBS have been very hands-off when it comes to Star Trek fan films. That said, fans also haven’t been pushing the envelope as much as we used to. Obviously, I’m hopeful that, at the very worst, the status quo continues. And if Skydance takes an even more indulgent posture with fans and our projects—within limits, of course—so much the better.

As for OTOY, I suspect they won’t come after fans for fan-edits, although again, I could be wrong. But here’s why I think I’m not wrong:

1. Unlike Paramount and CBS, OTOY isn’t in the business of owning and protecting intellectual property beyond their OctaneRender and LightStage scanning, along with their “digital doubles” technologies. In other words, they make money off of selling their products and services, not from creating Star Trek content. Now, it’s true that Apple might pay something to have OTOY’s offerings on Apple Vision, but that’s not OTOY’s primary source of revenue.
2. OTOY’s CEO, JULES URBACH, is a huge Star Trek fan himself (as you can read for yourself in this interview on TrekMovie.com). While I wouldn’t dream of speaking on his behalf, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s actually excited that so many fans are using OTOY’s videos as an “open source Lego set” for making their own edited versions. Urbach himself said that much of the original film was purposefully left ambiguous so fans could draw their own conclusions about what happened with Kirk and Spock and the rest. So the fact that some fans are literally providing their own interpretations through alternate edits of the film might be just what Urbach and OTOY were hoping for. But of course, I could be completely wrong.
3. At the time of this writing, OTOY’s video has more than 5 million views in less than a month. The fan-edits have views in the thousands or, at best, the tens of thousands. Is that really worth the hassle of dealing with YouTube to eliminate the “competition” that isn’t really competition? Ultimately, OTOY would end up playing Whack-a-Mole with all these fan-edits…and probably pissing off fans, as well. Right now, fans love OTOY, and people are watching and enjoying their film immensely. Why do anything to jeopardize that?
4. If push did come to shove and OTOY needed to file actual lawsuits, CBS and Paramount ate an estimated million dollars or more in legal fees dealing with Axanar Productions, who found a law firm to represent them pro-bono. Could history repeat itself? CBS and Paramount are both huge corporations with operating budgets in the billions. OTOY is still in start-up mode. The last thing they need is to be throwing money at lawyers just to protect IP that they don’t even own (OTOY owns the presentation of Paramount’s IP in the form of their film, but they don’t own the rights to Kirk or Spock or Saavik or Gary Mitchell or the Star Trek universes). Which brings us to the final point…
5. Any lawsuit filed by OTOY would need to involve Paramount Global simply because they licensed their IP to OTOY. Even a cease and desist letter would likely require Paramount’s approval before sending. The fact that Paramount isn’t bothering with fan films and fan-edits at the moment sends a loud message of silence to OTOY. In other words, OTOY would probably prefer to wait for Paramount Global to make the first move, and if they don’t, then why risk doing something that could inadvertently piss off the company you’re licensing content from?

Okay, back t the fan-edits. Three more to tell you about…

On the same day that Daydreaming’s fan-edit was posted, the channel of MARK JONKMAN (with 961 subscribers) posted “Star Trek UNIFICATION Best MSJ EDIT.” I wasn’t sure whether the title implied that MSJ’s edit was the best out there or if this video was the best of the fan-edits that MSJ had done. Either way, it was actually quite excellent, and I heartily recommend giving it a viewing…

This one had the longest runtime of any of the fan-edits, more than seven minutes longer than the original OTOY film! Pretty much all of that was front-loaded onto the beginning of the edit. But where Daydreaming limited their selections to a short bit from Generations and some of OTOY’s previous release, 765874: Regeneration, Mark Jonkman threw in everything but the kitchen sink. This included footage from all four of OTOY’s previous releases plus even more from the end of Generations. He also kept the entire 765874: Unification intact. Too much? Everyone has an opinion, of course, and you’re welcome to have yours.

The third fan-edit was posted two days after the first two and has more than 63K views as a type this. Granted the channel, The Geek and I, has 7.5K subscribers. This might actually be my favorite of the fan-edits. Take a look (and a listen)…

Like the other two, this person tacked Kirk’s death scene from Generations onto the beginning (which seems to be in fashion, I suppose) and also cut out everything before Kirk walking in the garden. In other words, this edit is Kirk-centered, as he only knows up to the moment he dies and then the moment of his resurrection and forward from there. Personally, I prefer the stuff that was cut out out, but again, everyone’s entitled to an opinion.

However, what I really did like, and what made this my favorite of the fan-edits, was the replacement of the music with classic TOS movie music, especially JAMES HORNER’s score from the closing credits of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the original film’s music from MICHAEL GIACCHINO, as well. It was beautiful and haunting and hopeful all at the same time. But Horner’s music just connects to certain neurons in my brain and covers me in a warm blanket of cherished memories and comfortable nostalgia. The addition of the old music doesn’t diminish from the impact of this beautiful film. It’s just another way to enjoy it…at least for me.

And finally, Ikura Prime’s YouTube channel posted this fan-edit on December 2…

Unlike Ikura Prime’s three predecessors, this editor listed every change made in the description of their video. If you’re curious…

• Changed Kirk’s death – fade to rock to fade to black
• Added 765874 – Regeneration Spock
• Gary Mitchell’s eyes open
• Shortened first shot of planet
• Shortened shots of the statues
• Fixed continuity when Saavik turns to face her Son
• Took out Kirk’s expression of doubt/concern before walking to Yor
• Shortened Kirk’s walk to Yor
• Shortened shot of Lighted pathway to Spock
• Shortened overhead shot of Kirk in pathway
• Shortened Kirk’s reaction after his younger selves disappear
• Added Spock TMP flashback
• Spock wakes up when Kirk puts his hand on the bed
• Shortened Kirk’s reaction to Spock raising eyebrow
• Shortened Kirk turning to face the sunset

Of course, every editor does things differently, and some cuts work better than others. The first cut of Star Wars from 1977 was reportedly a disaster that needed major reworking. (If you’ve never watched this video on how Star Wars was saved in the edit, you need to–every fan should.)

So in a way, these fan-edits are a fun learning experience in seeing how different editors can assemble their cuts in unique ways. That said, we should all respect the choices made by the actual editor(s) in the original. We may not always agree with those choices, but that was the vision of the creators.

As for copyright, well, just know that Fair Use is not a defense if the copyright infringement dog bites ya. But at least for now, the dog seems to still be sleeping. Don’t assume that will always be the case, kids.