Anyone who's active on social media or entertainment news is certainly aware of the Kickstarter campaign for a movie version of Veronica Mars. If you're not, I'll summarize: Veronica Mars is a television show that ran on the CW network from 2004 to 2007. It had a loyal fan base, but was cancelled nonetheless. As often happens in such cases, fans and show creators frequently spoke of making a movie based on the show. Sometimes such endeavors work...the most obvious being Star Trek. Usually, however, the box office returns for the movie don't justify the expenses...an example would be Serenity, which was a movie based on the television show Firefly. In the case of Veronica Mars, the studio that owned the show (Warner Bros.) wasn't interested in paying for a film but the show creators convinced them to get behind the film and distribute it if they could raise the production budget from the fans on a website called Kickstarter.
Kickstarter is a relatively new phenomenon. Founded in 2009, Kickstarter is a site that allows people with creative projects to raise funds from average, everyday people. Many different projects such as comic books, plays, music, video games, even food-related projects have found funding on this site. Of course, so have films. Prior to Veronica Mars, no feature-length motion picture ever found complete funding on Kickstarter. The site was mostly utilized by creators of short films and people who were seeking development monies for their features.
Veronica Mars changed all that. With a stated goal of raising $2 million dollars to cover production costs, the filmmakers and crew made an appeal to the general public. The response was overwhelming and people kicked in a whopping $5.7 million dollars for the production. How did they get nearly 3X what they asked for? The answer is simple. They assured donors that every penny raised would go into the production and more money meant greater effects and better stunts.
So...what does the success of Veronica Mars mean for the future of filmmaking? The answer lies in the time-tested axiom that success breeds imitation...especially in Hollywood. With studios tightening their purse strings and looking for guaranteed profits on their investments, its no wonder that makers of lower budgeted films are now turning to Kickstarter.
Zach Braff is the perfect example of a feature filmmaker turning to Kickstarter. Zach is a veteran actor who starred in the television show Scrubs as well as a number of films. He is also a director and screenwriter whose first directorial effort Garden State was a commercial and critical success. But Zach was still having a difficult time raising the funds for his next film, Wish I Was Here. According to Zach, he had an investor who was willing to provide the funds, but the investor wanted to maintain creative control of the project. In order to get around that, Zach turned to Kickstarter with a stated goal of raising $2 million. Less than 12 hours into the first day of his post, Zach has raised nearly half of his stated goal. I think its safe to say that his project could become as successful as Veronica Mars.
As Zach Braff's project shows, Kickstarter is rewriting the rules for filmmaking. It's making studio heads out of regular people. Prior to Kickstarter, studio heads or big money investors were the ones who decided which films saw the light of day and which didn't. But now consumers can decide. If we like a potential project, we'll fund it. Who cares what the big boys in the suits say?
I think Kickstarter has opened up a whole new world for the filmmaker and the filmgoer and it's very exciting. As both a filmgoer and a filmmaker, I'm doubly excited. My partners and I will be posting our film project, Tried and True on Kickstarter in the very near future. Here's hoping we can follow down the path that Veronica Mars has blazed. See you on Kickstarter!
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