The Veronica Mars Movie is Now a Kickstarter. For Real

Alright. I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t know jack about Veronica Mars.

So normally, I would not be writing this post. But the only editor on the site who is familiar with the cult hit show about a teenage detective uncovering corruption and murder in her home town in a subversion and homage to the noir genre has Wednesdays off. And right now she’s threatening to hold her breath until I publish a post telling you all that the folks behind Veronica Mars, including a large portion of the main cast and the series creator, have started a Kickstarter to get the movie made. And that if they can raise $2 million, Warner Bros. has agreed to market and distribute the movie that they’ll film this summer.

Here’s the video for the project:

Consider this to be the paragraph in which I would gasp excitedly about the potential for this project… had I seen one single episode of Veronica Mars. Sorry! Please do your best to imagine that I did.

But this probably isn’t just exciting for fans of the show, who’ve been waiting on a Veronica Mars movie ever since it was cancelled in 2007. Kickstarter is probably also over the moon, with the biggest film project they’ve ever hosted. This is a year where a Kickstarted movie won a Documentary Oscar, could it also be a year where a Kickstarted flick gets marketed, distributed, and makes bank for a major Hollywood studio. That said, the one thing I haven’t seen explained so far in the body of their Kickstarter (which contains awards ranging from t-shirts to a cameo to $400 for a member of the cast to follow you on Twitter for a year) is where the actual proceeds from the movie will go. If they go, as is usual, to Warner Bros., that’s a pretty sweet deal for the company. “You prove to us that there are $2 million worth of people who want to pay money for this movie, get their money, and then let us charge them more? Yeah, yeah, we’ll take that.”

On the other hand, most of the backer levels include a digital copy of the movie, so it remains to be seen who, exactly, will be shelling out big at the box office for this, if all the die-hard fans already own the movie. At this point I’d like to see it succeed just to see what happens. So far as I know, this is the first Kickstarter project to get an indepth feature in Entertainment Weekly before it was even announced. So go, Veronica Mars fans! Make a weird internet thing happen if that’s what you want to do! I’ll sit over here and watch.