EDIT so Warner has greenlighted the Veronica Mars movie and it’s going to be funded entirely with the money raised from Kickstarter. Kickstarter makes one more step towards becoming a corporate tool as it’s independent, enterprising spirit is compromised by the promise of big bucks. Whoo.
Hey Veronica Mars fans! There’s Great huh? It’s already smashed records and gained over $2.2 million with a whole 30 days to go. But the thing is, this isn’t a Kickstarter to make the movie, it exists to convince Warner Bros. it would be a good idea to make it. Yeah. Despite the claim that “pre-production will begin immediately” Rob Thomas has this to say first:
This is our shot. I believe it’s the only one we’ve got. It’s nerve-wracking. I suppose we could fail in spectacular fashion, but there’s also the chance that we completely revolutionize how projects like ours can get made. No Kickstarter project ever has set a goal this high.
So…
1. Warner Bros. owns the rights to the Veronica Mars name and characters.
2. Rob Thomas set up this Kickstarter with the participation of Kristen Bell and the “blessing” of Warner execs.
3. They will be using the success of this Kickstarter to justify producing a Veronica Mars movie. This project wasn’t created to actually produce anything.
4. This means that while other pitches are based on past success, marketability of stars, hell maybe even website impressions, Facebook likes, who knows what; this time it’s based on YOUR MONEY.
5. YOUR MONEY that, as they have already surpassed their goal, they are guaranteed to get whether Warner Bros. says yes or no
6. They are offering PDFs of the screenplay, DVDs, posters, even speaking roles in the movie as their incentives. Those incentives are based on the Kickstarter successfully winning over Warner Bros. enough to greenlight the movie. They already got your money though.
I may be all doom and gloom and maybe Warner will be blown away by the reaction and there are seventeen Veronica Mars movies. Or Warner looks at the number of people who actually donated which at this point is 37k or so and think “thirty seven thousand tickets sold ain’t that many tickets.” A lot of people could learn the hard way that Crowd Sourcing is an investment in a project and not a purchase of any kind. Honestly, I’m astonished that this project was allowed to be on Kickstarter considering there is NOTHING independent about it and it is not actually funding to create anything. How many good, local and constructive projects could have really used a cut of this money thirst Veronica Mars fans were willing to throw down on little more than the promise of a promise? How is it allowed? Oh, wait, Kickstarter gets 5% of the total funds raised. Which will be over a hundred thousand dollars in this case. Yeah.