Kickstarter, ‘Veronica Mars’ Fans Solute You!

OH MY GOD, IT’S HAPPENING! GAHHHHHHHHH

Sorry, I had to get that out before I could sit down and form words into sentences. Yesterday, Rob Thomas (not of Matchbox Twenty) and Kristen Bell teamed up to create a Kickstarter page for TheVeronica Mars Movie Project. They set a goal of $2 million with the promise to make the movie in the summer with the money. They reached that goal(and then some) within 10 hours and still have 29 days left of fundraising.

If you are sitting there scratching your head thinking, “What is Veronica Mars?” I will tell you:

Veronica Mars was one of the GREATEST shows on television to have been cancelled. If you have never seen Veronica Mars but are partial to “witty teenage dramas with a strong female lead” according to your Netflix queue, then go for it. Kristen Bell plays a P.I. in high school. So naturally her crime fighting life collides with the perils of adolescence. There are only three seasons and there’re lots of mystery and hilarious puns. Ugh! It is so good. Just watch it, I beg of you.

VM got the short end of the stick when UPN and The WB merged to form The CW. It was on UPN and had a pretty strong audience Seasons 1 & 2.  Then it was moved to The CW for the 2006-2007 season and that’s when all hell broke loose. Less people were watching and the show got cancelled, but no one told the writers and there was a CLIFF HANGER on the last episode of the series. We thought we’d never know who she chose!!!!!!!!!!

But don’t worry, guys, this story has a happy ending, as I told you above. Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell loved the show. I’m pretty sure the whole cast loved the show. And they loved their fans. So Rob Thomas set out to write a feature length script. It would tie up the loose ends and give the almost cult like fans some closure. But Warner Bros. said no and opted not to fund it, after giving the movie its own email address.

What the heck, Warner Bros.? They may have had their reasons. So, I suppose I can play devil’s advocate. Films are expensive to make and even more expensive if they fail. The show was only on for three years and it underperformed towards the end. Maybe Warner Bros. lost faith in the fans because we let them down that 2006-2007 season? (I’m SORRRRY!!) But Warner Bros. did give them a fair shot. The film was kind of under consideration until 2010, when Joel Silver announced that DVD sales for the show weren’t good enough to suggest fans would support the movie, even on a straight to DVD release. Everyone thought that might be the end.

But, Kristen Bell wouldn’t stop there. For six years she has held her pledge to fans. On most of her interviews, she made reference to the movie. Sometimes she wasn’t too optimistic. I mean, she couldn’t pay for this thing alone! But in recent months, she has urged friends and fans alike to take to Twitter, email, skywriting, whatever to BEG Warner Bros. to reconsider. She even tweeted the contact details for the movie at WB to have fans spam them. She was determined to create buzz around this film!

Then, in walked Kickstarter. You know, the website that helped bring you the BoobyPack and Beau Mirchoff’s Camp Sunshine. Thomas and Bell decided to attempt the largest film project in Kickstarter’s history. They gave us 30 days. We laughed and said “Challenge accepted!” (after taking time to watch the hilarious ensemble video they made).

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Kristen Bell is a celebrity. She’s a friend of Kimmel’s! Of course they reached $2.5 million in 10 hours.” And yes, that’s true. I am sure her friends were more than willing to throw her a couple thousand here and couple thousand there. That’s just what friends do, or at least celebrity friends with money to burn. But if you click on that list of backers, there are thousands of ordinary people listed there. Normal folks like you and me who banned together and said “We want this movie to happen.”

Maybe I’m just a film/TV nerd, but that makes me feel all tingly inside. In an age of reality television and vampire movies, it isn’t often you see actors and fans teaming up and fighting for something they have a need to watch. Kristen Bell could have said “We were cancelled for poor ratings, why should we help out our fans?” But she didn’t. And neither did the rest of the cast.

So I urge you not to lose faith in television and movies and the Hollywood elite! TV is not a “vast wasteland” and it can be a public forum. I cannot tell you how excited I am for this movie to happen! I think if you sat down and watched the show you would understand. Everyone on it loved what he or she was doing, and it shines through. This Kickstarter page gives me hope for Angela and Jordan! I mean hullo?! You can’t end a series on a CLIFF HANGER?!

Featured Image via IMDB.com