How High Will "Veronica" Go?

Kickstarter has been a boon to the creators of short films, web series, documentaries, and other smaller scale film projects. The list of famous names successfully raising money via Kickstarter crowdsourcing keeps growing, and now includes Charlie Kaufman, David Fincher, Dan Harmon, Amanda Palmer, John Kricfalusi, Masaaki Yuasa, Bill Plympton, Phil Tippett and the guys behind "Cyanide and Happiness." However, funding a full-length commercial feature film hadn't been tried before, since the amounts of money involved were exponentially larger than what Kickstarter campaigns usually handled. The most high profile film projects, including the story reel for Fincher's "Goon" movie, only asked for a few hundred thousand dollars. A decent quality feature would require millions to produce. A few Kickstarter campaigns had raised millions, but only for technology and video game projects.

Enter "Veronica Mars." The high school mystery series ran for three seasons from 2004 to 2007, but was gone from television too soon, leaving unfinished business and a sizable fanbase hoping for some kind of follow-up project. As with fellow cult favorite "Arrested Development," rumors of a movie sequel circulated for years, but looked increasingly unlikely as the years went by. A small cult audience, no matter how fervent and devoted, is almost never enough for a studio to finance the resurrection of a beloved TV or movie property. But what if they weren't risking the studio's money? Yesterday, show creator Rob Thomas, with the full blessing of Warner Brothers, who owns the rights, started a Kickstarter campaign for the "Veronica Mars" movie. He asked for $2 million, the highest Kickstarter goal ever for a film project, to be raised in 30 days. The full amount was raised in less than twelve hours, and now the question is, how high will that total climb before the end of the 30 day campaign? At the time of writing, it's at a little over $3 million and climbing. And the buzz and the excitement around the campaign are so infections, I'm a little sorry I'm not more familiar with the show.

The unprecedented success of the "Veronica Mars" movie is leading to all kinds of speculation about other possible projects that Kickstarter could make happen. How about a second "Firefly" movie? How about another season of "Deadwood"? However, there are a lot of reasons to be cautious here. Keep in mind that "Veronica Mars" is in a very unusual position, where most of the creative talent involved is still available to do a follow-up project like this, the budget requirements are fairly low, and Warner Brothers is willing to play ball. A Kickstarter funded production is still very much uncharted territory, and a major studio being involved brings up some sticky legal and financial issues. Remember also that the biggest Kickstarter film projects to date, like Charlie Kaufman's "Anomalisa" and "Goon" haven't been delivered yet. Kickstarter has grown so fast in such a short amount of time based largely on potential as opposed to actual product. Kickstarter projects, like any other entrepreneurial ventures, go awry all the time. CNN recently found that 84% of the biggest funded projects didn't meet their delivery deadlines, with around 30% by more than six months. Then there have been the growing number of failed Kickstarter projects that where the entrepreneurs couldn't deliver at all, leaving backers feeling cheated and wary of making future contributions

The "Veronica Mars" movie is high profile enough and has so many established, experienced professionals in charge that I don't think it'll be one of the failures. There's a solid timeline in place for production, Warner Brothers has already promised to distribute the film, many of the key actors have already signed on, and the media coverage that's been generated by the campaign will help to ensure things run fairly smoothly. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't still a lot of risks. Production issues aside, the biggest one that most people aren't thinking about is, what if the "Veronica Mars" movie turns out to be bad movie? What if the fans don't like it or are disappointed with it? Fans may scoff, but remember what happened with that second "X-files" movie? Or "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me"? Or "TRON: Legacy"? I'm sure the people working on those films had the best of intentions, but they ended up falling short of their fans' expectations, and those fandoms took some pretty hard blows.

However, there's no denying that crowdfunding movies and television shows has a lot of potential. Along with the recent investments by Netflix, Amazon, and others into web content, this marks the emergence of new sources of financing that weren't on anyone's radar a few years ago. Now thanks to them, "Arrested Development" is back. And "Veronica Mars" is back. And artists like Phil Tippett get to make their dream projects that no studio would have paid for in a million years, and do them on their own terms. Who knows who's going to be next in line?
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