Is Alec Peters part of this investor group? If not formally, does he have any conceivable tangential financial interest in the activities of this group?
When asked what Peters' role is in this investors' group, Axanar spokesman Mike Bawden replied, "You're not going to like my answer: I don't know the names of everybody involved in the group. And I've been told I can't disclose the names of anyone involved at this point in time."
Seems to me that if you're constrained from disclosing the names of the group members, you're not constrained from disclosing the names of people who are not involved. The silence is thunderous.
Without an answer to what kind of relationship Alec may have with this group or the studio as it is reconstituted, the public calls for this information will grow. Battening down the hatches will only make the calls louder.
This asset transfer carries minuses as well as pluses for Axanar. The biggest plus I see is that they escape the liability of hundreds of thousands in rent — what could've been an albatross around its neck the longer Axanar's production was halted.
Another plus: Another several hundred thousand dollars to put into production of Axanar. Assuming they will have the right to do so in the face of the copyright lawsuit and the very possible injunction.
Now the minuses: First, hope it's legal.
Second, taking what's likely to be a big PR hit. A sale like this, after touting your intention and capability of running a scifi movie studio and online distribution platform, looks like you're hiding something. Whether that something is the mysterious investor group bailing you out. Or if you're part of that secret group in some way so that you retain a financial interest in what you've sold away so you can now claim to be a nonprofit as a means of evading the "direct financial benefit" allegation in the copyright lawsuit.
And while they may not have to publicly disclose who those investors are, and whether Alec Peters or any other principals in Axanar are part of that group, that information may very well be discoverable by Loeb & Loeb on the studios' behalf. All the emails that must have been exchanged in the past few days leading up to this announcement are likely to be discoverable.
How is this going to play in front of a judge if he's asked to issue an injunction stalling the sale? Not to mention the injunction CBS is likely to seek on the film itself. And, finally, how's it going to look to a jury? Suddenly, the "fans" doing this movie "for the love of the franchise" starts to look like operators who thought they could get away with raising a lot of money with IP they didn't own and when the going got tough came up with a means to protect what financial interests they could.
Please note this is speculation but these questions are going to get asked. And if the response is, "the investors want to maintain their privacy," all that transparency and openness Axanar is supposed to be known for is gone.
