Not The Matchbox 20 Guy

So here’s something interesting. Rob Thomas, the creator of Veronica Mars (a television series that ended in 2007 and starred Kristen Bell as a high school student moonlighting as a private eye, in case you are like me and completely forgot about it) made a Kickstarter campaign to fund a Veronica Mars movie…which has just hit it’s goal of $2 million in something like 10 hours, with 29 more days to go.

I have never watched a single episode of Veronica Mars and I have no idea if it’s any good or not, but I still find myself absolutely transfixed in seeing how this all folds out. Considering it’s really the first success story in crowd funding a real movie, I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of attention paid to its success. Along with the warm reception Netflix had with it’s House of Cards experiment, and the upcoming Arrested Development return in May, there’s sure to be an absolute torrent of articles coming about how the models for television series and movies will all be “revolutionized” and whatnot, with none of the writers of those articles knowing what that actually means. People don’t even know how many new subscribers Kevin Spacey delivered to Netflix, even though that is the most important metric of success, and other shows that average more viewers right now than Veronica Mars ever did are still constantly under the threat of cancellation.

Still, obviously there was some surprise that there was so much interest in it so quickly, and mainly that for once, the interest carried actual dollars with it as well. I would have guessed that the youngish, internet savvy, yet gainfully employed demographic that bites hard at these type of things aren’t really represented significantly in Nielsen ratings…but for them to demonstrate that they still have considerable spending power if baited properly with the correct lure was probably a pretty big thing. And for a movie or even a one time release model like House of Cards, which measures success in terms of gross earnings and total views, versus television series whose success is measured in regular, weekly ratings based on actual viewings through the television box machine…it’s not a bad idea to keep going after this demographic and their highly disposable income. These guys won’t watch your television shows on television but they will throw their money at online trends at the drop of a hat.

I mean if a show like Veronica Mars, which averaged about 2.5 million viewers and whose only prominent star was Kristen Bell (who is now second banana on a Showtime television series that was happy that its season two premiere had a million viewers), then what would it mean for other television series begging for revival? For example…Firefly, which averaged 4.5 million viewers upon its cancellation, starred one of television’s current biggest stars in Nathan Fillion, and created by The Avengers architect Joss Whedon?

Oh wait, Fox was happy to fund the movie itself eight years ago and it bombed, not even making its budget back without DVD sales.

But maybe this demonstrates that there’s at least enough interest in this post-Netflix world to at least continue Firefly as a television series?

Oh wait, Nathan Fillion already stars in a much more successful show that averages like 12 million viewers, costar Gina Torres is busy with a show that pulls over 6 million viewers, and the creator is busy with the sequel of the third highest grossing film of all time.

Alright, so the dream of Firefly‘s second season is absolutely and completely dead, I should stop bringing it up. But for those of us that are hoping for eventual Arrested Development, Party Down (also co-created by Rob Thomas), or Community features? This is nothing but good news…right? Though with only 16 episodes away from that magical 100 episode requirement for syndication, it’s likely they’ll keep marching Community‘s zombified corpse all the way to the finish line, and we won’t even want a movie after that. Seriously, I’m like five episodes in and I already wished it would have just died.

Still, I find I’m most curious about how all the finances and numbers work out. An average 42-minute Veronica Mars episode back in 2004-2007 cost $1.7 million, with the series finale costing about $2.1 million. So the minimum $2 million funding goal makes sense. And if you want to cut corners, it’s really not that expensive to make a movie. Obviously there’s the gold standard of low budget/high earners that include The Blair Witch Project (reported costs range from $20,000 to $750,000) and Paranormal Activity ($15,000). But even with movies that aren’t filmed entirely on home video cameras, ensemble independent films with essential no names like Super Troopers only cost $1.5 million. Generally the biggest part of releasing a movie is finding a studio that will actually release your movie, but in this case, distribution is apparently already going to be looked after by Warner Brothers, who still own the rights to the property. Still, if you have a fully developed movie with its own established audience and with people literally paying money to demonstrate that they have interest…it’s not a bad distribution deal.

But today, as the line between television series and feature films continues to blur, production budgets across the board are getting higher, especially for the nicer shows. 42-minute dramas like Mad Men (an average of $2 million per episode), Breaking Bad ($3 million), Game of Thrones ($6 million) all have higher average episode budgets. House of Cards had a budget north of $100 million for 13 episodes. So there is a difference between just filming a television episode that runs as long as a feature film, and actually making a feature film. I mean the two Sex and the City movies had budgets of $65 million and $95 million respectively, and they killed.

Although considering that they’ve already hit $2 million in only one thirtieth of their funding window (it’ll likely hit $3 million by the end of today) it’s probably pretty likely they’ll have more money to play with. Does this mean unnecessary guest cameos and Avatar level special effects?

Who knows? I’ve never watched this show in my life and probably never will. But I can’t take my eyes off this Kickstarter.

I wish the real world would just stop hassling me