Veronica Mars Movie - Kickstarter
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I still can't believe it's finally gonna happen. How cool is that? $2million in ten hours? Well done fellow awesome fans!
I don't get the naysayers. What slippery slope exactly? The one where deserving projects with dedicated fans get to happen? Uhh...yes please, I'll slide down that slope!
I don't get the naysayers. What slippery slope exactly? The one where deserving projects with dedicated fans get to happen? Uhh...yes please, I'll slide down that slope!
Crazy how this got funded so quickly. I know that Shawn Ryan is now thinking about a Terriers movie.
Babylon 5 doesn't need wrapping up, it tied its loose ends off quite handily during its run. In fact, it did it a bit too well---which is part of the problem they've run into trying to get any spinoffs going.
Also, there's no good reason to hate it. Indifference, maybe, but what could possibly be so offensive about one of the better 90s SF shows?
I've seen all four seasons of the main show and think the dialogue is piss-poor and doesn't resemble anything you'd hear in real conversations and the "acting" aside from the actors who played Londo and G'Kar even worse. I know my opinion's far from the majority so just take it for what it is.
It goes beyond gauging audience interest. Warner realized they could get press for doing a Kickstarter, raise a budget without having to pay it back, and get nothing but profit with a VOD / home release. It's a perfect plan, if you have a fanatical nerd base, not to mention all the double dipping: People buying the digital release for $35 and then the DVD / Blu-ray when it comes out for all the extras.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's a brilliant move on WB's part.
S
Stone_Cold_Sisko
Guest
And most will fail to reach their goal. The market will take care of itself.
YES, please!
Or you can just pay $50 and get the script, a T-shirt, the digital copy and the DVD with all kinds of extras.
There are 5 seasons.
Am I the only one that liked the original movie idea better, the one it's graduation day and VM has to solve a mystery.
The current idea of VM not solving crimes for 6-7 years after she lost the election for her day is silly. I rather she finish college and become an FBI agent like the lame 4th season would have been.
There are 5 seasons.
You're right, of course. I disliked the show so much that after four seasons, I remember trying to start the fifth just for the sake of being a completionist but I couldn't do get more than a few episodes into it--I thought the show was awful.
Judging from the video in the Kickstarter, I could still buy Kristen Bell and Jason Dohring as college students. I don't know how much the other cast members who are supposed to be college age have aged.
But I'm hopeful they'll come up with something worthwhile since they're free to do pretty much whatever they want without much studio interference.
I took the first part of that description as Rob Thomas' brain dump of where things stand that isn't necessarily gospel. I'm assuming he can change the details of what Veronica and company have been up to since we last saw them as needed to fit the story he's trying to tell. It's not like they have any canon or other established lore beyond the last few minutes of the last episode they have to obey.
doubleohfive
Fleet Admiral
Certainly this is good news, and way to go Veronica Mars fans for making it happen.
Let me be clear - I'm happy for you guys. The one poster who dedicated $200 to this effort - wow, that's love!
My earlier concerns were, I think, valid though. Having had a night to think on it, I think my concern really becomes more tangentially forward than what I initially mentioned yesterday. I still think Warner Bros. is cheap and that they could have easily funded a project like this had they wanted to, but I understand it was more about gauging interest. That being said, there is still a troubling eventuality that could still happen if this becomes a regular thing for the filmmaking process that still unnerves me.
Filmmaking has always been a commercial business, and investors paying for the cost of a film always has had the tradeoff that the investors get to have a say in how things are done. It's why studio executives and network executives can rewrite and reshape television episodes left and right - they're the ones footing the bill. Likewise, why there are in many cases "theatrical" cuts and "director's" cuts of films. Someone somewhere along the way had more clout and got to have things done their way.
At a certain point, it won't be too far a leap to find ourselves not only living in a world where not only the studios but the fans themselves will be paying for the production of these films. And when that starts to become more and more regularly practiced, fans are going to want to have more say in what gets made. And how it gets made. It will take the very concept and act of creating content into a whole new territory.
I mean, not to be all doom'n'gloom-y about it, but we as fans have a terrible, terrible track record. Let's put aside for a moment the very real fact (whether you believe it or not) that realistically, unless you work in Hollywood, it's very unlikely that you actually do "understand" exactly, "how" the business works. Let's instead focus and look at Star Trek. Can you imagine how much worse the reaction to Enterprise would have been had fans donated money to that show to keep it going? How much more would we resent and loathe Rick Berman for it? Look at Babylon Five and JMS - the guy still --still!-- insists that Paramount stole the idea for Deep Space Nine from him. How much more outrage would there have been if he'd been perpetuating that rumor for the last 20 years (as he has been) if we had all plunked down our own hard earned cash?
I realize this is all hypothetical and I realize there's an element of worrywarting I'm doing and I realize it might be too academic a discussion for most to be concerned with, and I also fully recognize that there will be those reading this thread who will take umbrage to my comment about not getting "how" the biz actually works, but it is a concern.
It should be a concern.
For me personally, my fandom has waned significantly over the years mainly due to the infighting, the vitriol, the sometimes outright embarrassing way some of the fans I've encountered conduct themselves in public, and frankly, the innate stupidity I see demonstrated by fans here and elsewhere.
I don't for a second believe that things are going to improve on that front if we, as fans, start to become contributors to the very content we dissect and complain about on a daily basis. Likewise I don't think its necessarily a bad thing that there are more and more new ways to produce new, original content, but I do think it's something we should be wary of.
Just my two cents.
Let me be clear - I'm happy for you guys. The one poster who dedicated $200 to this effort - wow, that's love!
My earlier concerns were, I think, valid though. Having had a night to think on it, I think my concern really becomes more tangentially forward than what I initially mentioned yesterday. I still think Warner Bros. is cheap and that they could have easily funded a project like this had they wanted to, but I understand it was more about gauging interest. That being said, there is still a troubling eventuality that could still happen if this becomes a regular thing for the filmmaking process that still unnerves me.
Filmmaking has always been a commercial business, and investors paying for the cost of a film always has had the tradeoff that the investors get to have a say in how things are done. It's why studio executives and network executives can rewrite and reshape television episodes left and right - they're the ones footing the bill. Likewise, why there are in many cases "theatrical" cuts and "director's" cuts of films. Someone somewhere along the way had more clout and got to have things done their way.
At a certain point, it won't be too far a leap to find ourselves not only living in a world where not only the studios but the fans themselves will be paying for the production of these films. And when that starts to become more and more regularly practiced, fans are going to want to have more say in what gets made. And how it gets made. It will take the very concept and act of creating content into a whole new territory.
I mean, not to be all doom'n'gloom-y about it, but we as fans have a terrible, terrible track record. Let's put aside for a moment the very real fact (whether you believe it or not) that realistically, unless you work in Hollywood, it's very unlikely that you actually do "understand" exactly, "how" the business works. Let's instead focus and look at Star Trek. Can you imagine how much worse the reaction to Enterprise would have been had fans donated money to that show to keep it going? How much more would we resent and loathe Rick Berman for it? Look at Babylon Five and JMS - the guy still --still!-- insists that Paramount stole the idea for Deep Space Nine from him. How much more outrage would there have been if he'd been perpetuating that rumor for the last 20 years (as he has been) if we had all plunked down our own hard earned cash?
I realize this is all hypothetical and I realize there's an element of worrywarting I'm doing and I realize it might be too academic a discussion for most to be concerned with, and I also fully recognize that there will be those reading this thread who will take umbrage to my comment about not getting "how" the biz actually works, but it is a concern.
It should be a concern.
For me personally, my fandom has waned significantly over the years mainly due to the infighting, the vitriol, the sometimes outright embarrassing way some of the fans I've encountered conduct themselves in public, and frankly, the innate stupidity I see demonstrated by fans here and elsewhere.
I don't for a second believe that things are going to improve on that front if we, as fans, start to become contributors to the very content we dissect and complain about on a daily basis. Likewise I don't think its necessarily a bad thing that there are more and more new ways to produce new, original content, but I do think it's something we should be wary of.
Just my two cents.
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I completely agree, this could be a bad example of where things are leading. WB couldn't give 5 million to make a movie? If this make 20 million on a 3 million dollar budget, that's 15 million in profits. Would we get a sequel paid for by the studio? Or would we have to go through this again and then the studio makes all the moneyfor doing very little.
Still. I don't care, I just hope this doesn't tun out to be as horrible as the Dead Like Me movie.
Still. I don't care, I just hope this doesn't tun out to be as horrible as the Dead Like Me movie.
I think the key thing in this discussion is that it is Warner Bros. Warners doesn't like to pay for anything. Whatever they put out is "testing the waters" and they will fight tooth and nail to avoid paying a cent they don't have to.
Example - Babylon 5. To get each subsequent season greenlit, the previous season had to have been paid for. PTEN (and, later, TNT) had to cover the entire cost of the season before another would go forward. Following that logic, season 1 (at least) broke even, which is the reason we got season 2, etc.
WB was not convinced that there was enough market to justify DVD release of the series, so they put out a "tester" DVD, with the pilot movie and a second, In the Beginning. It sold well enough that they decided to release a single season of the show on DVD. Even as they did that, they did not decide to do a season 2 until they got the sales figures for season 1. And on and on.
There were 110 episodes. Per JMS, in 1999, the budget for each episode was roughly 920,000 dollars. That means the budget for the series - not counting the movies - was $101,200,000. And that cost was entirely paid for by sales of the show to the network and tv stations.
As far back as 2004 - 9 years ago - the sales of the DVDs alone had generated half a BILLION dollars. But even today, WB claims that Babylon 5 still hasn't recouped its cost, so the cast/crew who had back end deals haven't seen a dime of it. Hollywood accounting. Don't you love it?
They then decided to do another "test" with The Lost Tales, a direct-to-dvd series. They ponied up about the amount two episodes of the original series would have cost, and the crew had to start from scratch with the movie, recreating everything. Though it made money, it didn't make enough profit.
It's something I've thought for years ... If someone approaches WB and says they will self-finance a project in a WB universe, WB will be more than happy to let them, as long as WB keeps 100% of the profits. Fans could come up with a hundred million bucks to finance a B5 movie, sure. The people who actually made it wouldn't see any of the money though.
I have never watched this show. I do periodically go to this KS page and watch the pledges accumulate. They've got like $200,000 since this morning and they are $800,000 past their goal.
Season 1 is fantastic. Season 2 is still pretty good. Season 3 is when it moved from UPN to CW and it shows, unfortunately, but it's still decent.
There's been enough fan talk here on TBBS to ensure that the (now discounted) DVDs are queued up on my shelf.
Besides, Kristen Bell is adorable.
Besides, Kristen Bell is adorable.
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