Crowdfunding Will Not Save Us: Thoughts On The Veronica Mars Kickstarter

Editor’s Note: Please be advised that this long-assed editorial is written by someone who knows exactly fuckall about the television and motion picture industries. So the opinions therein are bourne purely from a dude who has spent more than 40 years watching niche properties flare up on the horizon, getting excited in anticipation like every other genre geek, and being disappointed after they pass. Plus, I’m hung over right now.

The world of genre TV and movie fans went mildly apeshit this week when Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell, the respective creator and star of the mid-2000’s CW show Veronica Mars, put up a Kickstarter project to fund a Veronica Mars major motion picture. At launch time, it seemed like a longshot – they were asking for $2,000,000 within 30 days, which was more than any other Kickstarter had ever set as a funding goal, but Thomas said in the project’s description that the deal with Warner Bros., who owns the actual rights to the property, had already agreed to greenlight the movie (albeit for a limited theatrical release) if they hit the ambitious funding goal.

When I heard about the project, it sounded kinda ridiculous to me. Trying to scrape up two million simoleans from a fanbase just in the hopes of getting a genre flick made seemed about as productive to me as clapping your hands to keep Peter Pan alive, or clawing futilely at a Fenway Park beer counter’s security barrier ten seconds after the seventh-inning stretch.

Well, shows you how much I know, because the Kickstarter launched on Wednesday morning. As of this writing, it’s raised $3,271,607 from 49,393 backers, with 28 days left to still Get That Paper. And reportedly, Warner Bros. has, indeed, greenlit the project as a go once the Kickstarter ends, with filming to start this summer.

And the success of this project has other genre fans in a lather, because if Veronica Mars can get made with a Kickstarter, then maybe our favorite dead properties can get a new lease on life via Kickstarter. Hell, it’s already starting; Shawn Ryan mentioned maybe trying to get a Terriers movie going back in August…

Contemplating KickStarter campaign to make 2 hour Terriers movie. Would need Fox approval (no gimme). Who’d be in?

— Shawn Ryan (@ShawnRyanTV) August 11, 2012

…and now that Veronica Mars has made its nut, he’s saying it yet again:

Very interested to see how this Veronica Mars kickstarter goes. Could be a model for a Terriers wrap up film.

— Shawn Ryan (@ShawnRyanTV) March 13, 2013

So all around the land, genre geeks are losing their shit. Jericho fans are stocking up on peanuts and occasionally dropping from anaphylactic shock. Twin Peaks nuts are pouring out flagons of coffee on Jack Nance’s grave in the hopes he will arise for a reboot (well, mostly it’s Lara Flynn Boyle doing that, but mainly because coffee has a whole calorie in it). Browncoats are rapidly becoming Brownpants. And all of them are hoping that the Veronica Mars Kickstarter might mean that their favorite property could come back the same way.

Which is a damn shame, because I really don’t think that this is going to work.

Look: when it comes to genre properties that includes a character or A-List star that everybody knows – think your Spider-Man, your Batman, your Iron Man – the sky is the limit; the whole free world goes to those movies. Just ask The Avengers and their billion dollars in box office. But when it comes to the more niche stuff, stuff that is beloved by small groups that are often vocal on the internet, well, things are a little different.

When it comes to real niche stuff, like your Serenity, your Scott Pilgrim or your Watchmen, well, we fans are vocal. We are adamant. And we are everywhere on the Internet.

And we only ever spend between $15 and $30 million at the box office. And that ain’t enough to launch a franchise.

We’ve seen it happen over and over again. Snakes On A Plane became an Internet cause celebre, with enough Internet enthusiasm to prevent the studio from changing its name to Pacific Flight 121, to get Samuel L. Jackson to shoot himself screaming about “motherfucking snakes,” and to get Jackson to make an appearance at San Diego Comic-Con… and it made only $13 million its opening weekend. Scott Pilgrim was all over Comic-Con and heavily marketed to geeks, and all to make about $31 million in total box office. Hell, Serenity, which was a movie so screeched for it brought the Firefly franchise back from the grave, and for which I was so personally excited I conned my parents into going, despite their never having seen Firefly, by telling them it was like “a solo movie about Han Solo”? That pulled in $25 million in total box office.

Hell, even Watchmen, a movie that was advertised as heavily as The Avengers or The Amazing Spider-Man or any other mainstream superhero flick in recent memory… a movie that was so anticipated that the screenwriter begged fans to see it more than once to prove that we geeks are willing to actually spend money on the things that we scream on the Internet that we love (and I did; I saw it four times in the theaters)? Yeah, the box office dropped more than 50% in its second week to about $23 million, and it wound up losing money during its theatrical run, despite all the advertising to the straights and the rubes.

We geeks love the things that we love, and we are loud about them and we proselytize about them to anyone who will listen, but we just don’t back it with the bucks. Hell, I know shit about the movie business, but even I know that a geek movie property can probably figure it’ll bring in about $20 million, give or take a few million, total.

And I can hear what you’re saying: “Rob,” you’re saying, “That blanket statement is unfair. Everybody knows that we geeks wind up spending money on the DVDs and Blu-Rays of those movies we love! Hell, it was the DVD sales of Firefly that got Serenity made!” Sure, let’s take it as a given fact that DVD and Blu-Ray sales help movie studios decide to keep genre properties in production.

All of these elements will come into play with regards to the Veronica Mars movie. The first element being that, if we can only count on geeks to spend about $20 million at the box office for a niche property, Veronica Mars is already down more than three million. And that’s money that has come from the fans before a single frame of film has been shot.

Now, let’s assume that the movie is completed. Warner Bros. has gone on record saying that the movie will be produced completely via Kickstarter donations, which are going directly into a Warner Bros. account for the production. Unless Warner Bros. skims some of the Kickstarter money off the top, even if Veronica Mars pulls in the full 20 million Geek Bucks in donations, Warner has made no profit. Further, Warner Bros. has only committed to a “limited” theatrical release, which could mean the Austin, TX, New York and Los Angeles premieres, plus the premieres in local towns that you can buy for a $5,000 donation (four are already gone as of this writing). But even if Warner Bros. gets excited by the Kickstarter and puts the movie into wider release, they have limited their ability to make money on it, because literally hundreds of contributors know that they are already getting copies of the movie.

If you contribute more than 35 bucks to the Veronica Mars Kickstarter, you get a free digital copy of the flick after it gets released. If you contribute 50 clams, you get the download and a DVD. If you give a cool hundred or more? It’s a Blu-Ray / DVD combo pack, plus the download. So as of this writing, the Veronica Mars movie production, before shooting frame one, has given away 33,630 copies of the movie. To their contributors, who are the people who were most likely to buy the fucking thing once it hits video stores. Now, that’s not a huge number in the greater scheme of things; big movies sell DVDs and Blu-Rays to the tune of millions of copies… but we’re not talking about The Avengers, here. We’re talking about a movie based on a little TV show that was cancelled about seven years ago. And if you’ve thrown $100 at this Kickstarter, are you gonna be more likely to hunt up a theater to see this thing on the big screen? Or are you gonna enjoy your warm fuzzy feeling that you helped get the movie made, and wait a month for your Blu-Ray to show up in your mailbox?

And then there’s the elephant in the room: even if Warner Bros. gets psyched about the Internet excitement and decides to put Veronica Mars out in wide release? It’s gonna have Serenity disease. By which I mean that Joe Blow from Falmouth will see this movie listed at his local Megaplex and will say, “Eh, I didn’t watch the show, so I won’t understand what’s going on in the movie.” Like I said before, I had to con my folks into seeing Serenity – a movie that was made to be welcoming to people who didn’t watch Firefly – and they still said they didn’t like it because they hadn’t seen the show. And it’s not like you can idly decide to catch up on the Veronica Mars show, because it is no longer on Netflix Instant for free. So we’re in a situation where I think Veronica Mars is only gonna appeal to hardcore fans of the show… the hardcore fans who have already basically bought the movie on DVD.

Look: I am a bitter cynic, and we have already established that I don’t know every fucking thing, considering I thought the Kickstarter would fall flat without reaching the funding goal (and, by the way, contributions are up $12,735 since I started writing this). But I just don’t see a long-term upside to this. The hardcore fans who were most likely to spend money on this have already spent it, and are guaranteed a free copy of the movie before anyone can actually make any money on it. While the fans are mitigating the risk to a movie studio by fronting the production money, they are also minimizing the potential reward to the studio because they have already paid their money. And all the Kickstarter dollars in the world aren’t going to widen the audience for a property that has already established difficulty in cultivating a wide fanbase.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong about all of this, because there is nothing I would like more in the world than to kick in a few dollars in exchange for another Serenity movie, or a final Terriers story. But history indicates that, almost no matter what, a geek flick has a $20 million lifespan. So unless the people who have already paid hundreds of dollars up front are willing to spend hundreds more on the back end – which we never have before – I don’t see a future in this model.

Yeah, it’s exciting, and if it works out we could be in store for more movies we’ve always prayed for… but I don’t feel like we’re on the verge of a geek revolution here. I feel like I’m in line for a beer at Fenway, with the last notes of “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” playing.