With the launching of a $2 million campaign by Rob Thomas, creator of Veronica Mars, a detective show that has been off air since 2007, it looks like the dedicated fans of the show are getting their long-awaited movie.
According to Patrick Kevin Day from Latimes.com, the television show Veronica Mars was canceled in 2007. The CW wanted more America’s Next Top Model, and in that time, both Thomas and star Kristen Bell talked about the prospects of a movie that might tie up all the loose ends. Now, just as fans were beginning to lose all hope of seeing their favorite girl detective and her friends on the big screen, Thomas started a Kickstarter just for the movie, with the goal of $2 million.
Stars of the show, Kristen Bell, Jason Dohring, Enrico Conlantino and Ryan Hansen, along with Thomas himself, made the dream of a Veronica Mars movie become a reality when they posted a promotional video on Kickstarter.com, a site that raises money and funds projects through the Internet. Since its creation in 2009, Kickstarter has raised more than $500 million for some 35,000 creative projects, and through this video, the cast and creator asked fans of Veronica Mars to help with the funding of Veronica Mars the Movie. The Veronica Mars project is by far the largest in the film category for Kickstarter.
As a true example of just how dedicated Veronica Mars’s fans are, the project reached its goal in less than 10 hours and confirmed that the dream of a movie was finally on the way. “There were a few minutes of nothing happening,” Thomas said to Jake Coyle from Abcnews.com. “Then in an hour, watching that ticker go was mesmerizing. I had an attention span of, like, four seconds because everything on my computer screen I wanted to look at the same time. The Twitter feed was going crazy; the emails were going crazy and then watching that Kickstarter total go up.”
While the emotional side is surely the biggest motivation, the donors are also paying for tangible goods. The rewards include outgoing voicemails from the stars, scripts of the movie, signed posters and even a minor speaking role for the one person donating $10,000.
According to Imdb.com, almost all of the original cast, including Bell, Dohring, Conlantino, Hansen, Tina Majorino, Francis Capra and Percy Daggs III, will be joining the movie. The movie was fully funded and the $5.7 million that was raised was charged from the backers’ credit cards on Friday, April 12 2013. The shooting of the movie will begin during summer of 2013. Veronica Mars movie is set to be released in early 2014.