Veronica Mars Movie Project

[Herr Matzat]

So they could basically fund most of the movie of they makeenough?

Let's put it this way. Amanda Palmer - a rather obscure and niche musical artist asked for 100,000 dollars for an artbook, album and the start of a tour. In the end? She got:

$1,192,793

There's no telling how far this could go.

She just had a TedTalk put up about her Kickstarter the other day.

It´s hard to say how well this will go on. My experience with Kickstarter is that the first and last days usualy are the strongest and that there are some spikes if there is good media. Usualy people that actualy devote a lot of time to promoting their kickstarter during the pledge periode get a lot more than people who update like two times... so if you consider that these people actualy have some kind of audiance and the opertunety to make a good amount of late night talk show aperances i can see easely go in double digget millions. If they do nothing it also might dwiddel out and end at 4-6 which still would be great.

[TGC]

To be fair, Amanda Palmer also had Neil Gaiman tweeting and blogging and plugging her KS a lot. That surely helped.

[GoGo Yubari]

The next step for them, and they've said this on their Twitter too, is figuring out additional rewards for donators and setting goals. Like, "if we hit three million you get this" and so on.

[apsham]

Ted Griffin has already said he's watching this on the possibility of a Terriers wrap-up movie.

[Noah]

That woman has unappealing eyebrows.

[Herr Matzat]

Ted Griffin has already said he's watching this on the possibility of a Terriers wrap-up movie.

I would be all over this, even if i feel the Season wraped up very nice and i dont know if the show has a following as noticable as Veronica Mars.

[TheSqauredCircleMessiah]

So if this is an indication, I'd say Kickstarter could be used to fund another 5 seasons of Firefly.

Oh come on, why do you have to say that?

I want that to happen now

This is from a recent Joss Whedon interview about that very subject:

ABV: So, what does this mean for Firefly?

JW: That's what everybody wants to know about. Uh, yeah. My fourth feeling when I read about [the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign] was a kind of dread. Because I realized the only thing that would be on everybody's mind right now. I've said repeatedly that I would love to make another movie with these guys, and that remains the case. It also remains the case that I'm booked up by Marvel for the next three years, and that I haven't even been able to get Dr. Horrible 2 off the ground because of that. So I don't even entertain the notion of entertaining the notion of doing this, and won't. Couple years from now, when Nathan [Fillion]'s no longer [on]Castle and I'm no longer the Tom Hagen of the Marvel Universe and making a giant movie, we might look and see where the market is then. But right now, it's a complete non-Kickstarter for me.

[Quom]

That woman has unappealing eyebrows.

It's much weirder when she doesn't draw them on.

[Herr Matzat]

I think i have seen her nacked more often than i have seen her dressed, some people are just different.

So yay, 3,3 million. Things finaly start slowing down. I wonder if they got planes to use their starpower to have some spikes in the comming month or if this will be the average kickstarter slowdown untill the finale 24 houres.

[Ant]

It does make you wonder if a proper public run (finances mainly) network could be in the offing following the rise of Kickstarter. I doubt it would be sustainable in that business model but the cancellation/renewal of shows would lean more towards funds invested rather than ratings.

[Herr Matzat]

The german version of The Office once collected a million for something like that. But all in all I doubt it. Most Chanels are just in it for the largest profit and not for breaking even. What i could see is that some people go straight for the Web like Dr Horrible but in a longer fashin than 3 x 15 minutes.

[Your Mom]

Thinking about going back and rewatching this. Was such a good show and it will be nice to be refreshed before the movie

[Herr Matzat]

91,585 Backers $5,702,153 pledged of $2,000,000 goal

0 seconds to go

nice one. I heared rob said somewere that five million would be perfect. I think this still is a little less with all the kickstarter fees and reward production/shipping but it´s close enough. Also, the most backers a kickstarter ever had!

To get an idea about how much money might be "lost" on fees, rewards and shiping with such a high amount of backers here is a update Dubble Fine did about a year ago on their forums.

Hello backers! One of the key themes of this project is TRANSPARENCY. We really want to share the whole process with you, and that includes something that is usually a big secret on a game: Where does all the money go? Sorry if you don’t talk about money in your family, because we’re going to talk about it here. As you may know, we recently raised quite a bit. $3,446,371 to be specific. But that money has to go towards a lot of different things, and that’s what we’ve been working on figuring out over the past couple weeks. In order to schedule out and staff this game, we first had to actually figure out what the game’s budget would be. And now we can share a bit of insight into that process!

Fees

The first thing to be deducted from our total was Amazon fees. For every payment made through Kickstarter, Amazon took 5%. After that, Kickstarter took their 5%. There were a handful of failed transactions that were never corrected as well, leaving our final total after fees and failed transactions at $3,099,660.

Rewards

The next step of this process was figuring out how much it would cost to make and ship all of the physical rewards we offered. It was important that we set aside all this money up front so we could deliver products that live up to our high standards (holy cow you guys are going to be so stoked when you see this stuff). We also wanted to make sure the process of getting this all shipped out had as little impact on the team as possible, so we hired the amazing folks over at Fangamer to handle manufacturing, storing, packing, and shipping all of the rewards. Here’s the breakdown on where it landed:

rewardsa.jpg

It may look like a lot of money, but hey it’s a lot of rewards! These numbers were actually all being run while the Kickstarter project was still underway. Each time we prepared to add a new reward we ran the numbers to see how much it would cost to offer the new reward to existing backers. For each new reward, that amount was covered within hours of adding the item to the project, so this amount paid for itself and then some by enticing more of you lovely backers to sign up.

Documentary

After Kickstarter, Amazon, and rewards had been accounted for, we were left with $2,626,429. At this point we were ready to split the money with 2 Player Productions. Originally, 2PP was asking for $100,000, but just like us they were asking for a bare bones budget and their production has expanded quite a bit in reaction to the unexpected amount of support and interest in the project. It meant not just following us for 6 months, but for an entire year. It also meant covering a lot more travel (they’re in Portland, we’re in SF), buying new equipment, and paying for an amazing score from Terrance Lee. Taking this all into account, we agreed that a fair split would be to give 2PP 15% of the money after fees and rewards. This put the documentary budget at $393,964.

Game

Using the modern miracle that is math, that means we can now deduce that our game budget is $2,232,465. That’s way higher than $300,000! And will most definitely ensure that this game is suuuuuuuuuuper awesome! Here’s a neat lil’ pie graph to help visualize the breakdown:

piecc.jpg

At this point things became much more familiar for us. It turned into an exercise in allocating money for expenditures such as VO, localization, music, marketing, and QA testing, then determining how large the team can be and how long the project will run.

In the end it means we’re in a much more ideal situation. Instead of a team of 3 working for around 6 months, we’ll have a team of 11 working for around a year, which ultimately will result in a better game. AND IT’S ALL BECAUSE OF YOU!!

[GoGo Yubari]

So basically at this point nearly everyone who's ever been main cast on the show and whose character isn't dead will be in the movie. Veronica, Keith, Logan, Wallace, Tina, Dick Casablancas, Weevil, and Piz will all be on it. So that leaves, like... Parker and Duncan. I'm assuming Parker won't show up. I'll be a little surprised if the Kanes don't have a presence in some capacity seeing as they were clearly set up to have a major presence in season 4 had it happened.

Recurring characters of note confirmed in addition to Vinnie Van Lowe, as seen above, include Deputy Leo (Max Greenfield), Gia Goodman (Krysten Ritter), Madison Sinclair (Amanda Noret), Deputy Sacks (Brandon Hillock), and some other one-shot characters. Martin Starr will be appearing in the movie too as a new character also there for the reunion, which is awesome because Martin Starr is great. I hope like hell that his and Ryan Hansen's characters interact a lot.

[Hobo]

Nobody will be told to go see the Wizard though

[Herr Matzat]

I finished rewatching season 2 yesterday. Much fun. Now all they need to do is get that movie ready untill i finish rewatching season 3. >_>

[Johnny Latino Heat]

So I've never watched a single episode of Veronica Mars, but since apparently it's so good, I went to look on an online store here in Portugal, and to my surprise, there was a sale at that store and I bought all 3 seasons on DVD for 30€ (about £26,1, so... about £8,7 for each season). Also bought the two first seasons of Chuck (which I also never saw, but apparently is very good as well) and the first season of Everybody Loves Raymond (again, the three packs cost £26,1, £8,7 per season). Good deals or bad deals, EWB?

[GoGo Yubari]

I don't care about Everybody Loves Raymond, but otherwise good deals. First season of Veronica Mars is wonderful, second is pretty good, third is not so good but has some good moments.

[Hobo]

First look at the VM movie!

[Herr Matzat]

The panel (comic con) has already been "leaked" to youtube aswell. But i asume the official version will be a lot easier to understand, considering that they take a cupple of days to put it on it might even have various camera angles.