Yesterday, the defunct television show Veronica Mars made internet history. It became the fastest growing Kickstarter project of all time. Creator Rob Thomas announced that they were raising funds for a movie. If they reached their two million dollar goal by April 12, a movie would finally happen after six years off the air.
After only twelve hours, the goal was met. The Veronica Mars movie is currently sitting at 2.8 million dollars or so.
Am I happy about this? As a Veronica Mars fan, of course I am happy. The end of the third season was frustratingly ambiguous. I would love to revisit Veronica, Logan, Keith, Wallace, et al.
However, this project has brought up my conflicted feelings about Kickstarter itself.
I am really of two minds– possibly more– when it comes to Kickstarter.
First of all, people have every right to spend their money on whatever the hell they want.
Second of all, the idea of pooling money together from a multitude of sources is a big middle finger to the corporate world. Artists can be responsible for their own fates. It’s just going to cost them some buttons, stickers and whatever other incentives they throw at their Kickstarter supporters.
But what makes me take pause is not every Kickstarter is a Veronica Mars. In fact, what makes it noteworthy to people who don’t give a crap about Veronica Mars is the fact this is so unusual.
This Kickstarter was so successful because this was a project people have been wanting for years. This wasn’t so much a movie fundraiser as it was a petition that actually did something. Fans put their money where their mouth is and told the studio that yes, they really wanted this movie.
Which is not what most Kickstarters are.
The most successful Kickstarters tend to be for the people who don’t really need a Kickstarter.
Penny Arcade, one of the most successful webcomics on the internet and the organizers of the PAX series of conventions, held a Kickstarter so their website could be free of ads. They raised twice their goal.
Order of the Stick, another popular webcomic, held a Kickstarter to raise money to fund a reprint of their books. They raised nearly 1.2 million above their goal.
One of the most controversial is musician Amanda Palmer. A well-established musician, formerly half of the Dresden Dolls, Palmer decided Kickstarter was the way to fund an album. She raised 1.2 million, when her initial goal had been one hundred thousand dollars. She later tried to bribe musicians to open for her with nothing more than beer, merch and hugs (and I suppose the honour of opening for her), claiming she didn’t have the thirty-five thousand dollars needed to pay them.
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Could I, for example, raise money to fund the printing a book? Well, I suppose it depends on how much I was asking for. It also depends on what book I was publishing. If I wanted to do a Kickstarter to raise money for the printing of Ensign Two, yeah, I might be able to do it. But this would largely come from the fact that my artist, Kevin Bolk, is a well-known internet artist with an established fanbase.
That I could probably get a couple of thousand to do a print run. But if I wanted to, say, do an independent printing of The Otherkind book I’ve been writing, I’d probably be SOL. I could probably get a thousand from friends, family and maybe a handful of fans of my comics and fan fictions that are curious as to what I’d to when unencumbered by drawing limitations or copyright. But I wouldn’t be able to garner nearly enough to do a full print run.
Is it jealousy? Well, I really can’t judge, now can I? I’m utterly biased on that front.
Some people use Kickstarter as an elaborate pre-order system. This utterly flies in the face of what Kickstarter is supposed to be. They actually say up front they are not a store and if you’re using it to take pre-orders, that’s what you’re making it into.
Like I said, people can throw their money at whatever they want. It’s their money. But in the case of Order of the Stick, why don’t they just set up a pre-order and use the money garnered from that to pay for the reprint? Obviously, with the amount of money they did raise there was enough interest from the fans to just say “Okay, here’s what we want to print. Will you buy it?”. This would also cut down on these projects which garner so much more than they need and the need to sort through the incentives they promised.
Kickstarter has a 43% success rate. That’s not a terrible number. A good portion of that 57% are projects that garner absolutely no support because the project is just plain bad.
But I do wonder what are the projects that succeed and which ones fail. We only hear about the massive successes, the ones that are noteworthy and they’re noteworthy because of the names behind them.
Maybe it’s not Kickstarter itself I have a problem with. It’s the idea that it’s this wonderful place where independent artists can raise the money to work on their dream project.
Maybe I will read more about the crowdfunding format, experiment with it, see if I’m wrong about it. But these are my initial feelings and how I’ve felt for a while.
I am happy about the Veronica Mars movie (and I’ll admit, I kicked them twenty bucks when I heard about it– before they’d reached their two million dollar goal) because I want to see the movie. I do wonder what kind of precedence it sets for movie studios.
It is a Warner Brothers movie. It will be distributed by them. Ultimately, any profits made from the movie will go to them. There were be a limited theatre run, but the movie is primarily going to live on Video on Demand. This is not the most difficult thing to accomplish. The studio isn’t putting itself out there at all. But this is a studio’s job. They are going to make money off fans off the backs of fans.
Veronica Mars has been spinning its wheels for years. I can legitimately see why crowdfunding was needed. The studio was never going to do it and it has reached the point where a movie needs to be done or it will never happen. This is the Hail Mary. I just don’t want this to be the precedent. Where a studio will only take a risk on something if they can whip round movie viewers before anything has been shot. If the studio isn’t going to risk anything, then the studio isn’t needed. It is another example in the problematic nature of creations being own by conglomerates rather than their creators. If Rob Thomas were free to make Veronica Mars for anyone but Warner Brothers, this would have happened years ago.
(Before people try to get Kickstarter projects going for their own favourite cancelled shows– I know Firefly, Doctor Horrible and pre-emptively for Community have already been mentioned– Veronica Mars was spearheaded by the creator and the star of the show. There is already a script and as soon as the fundraiser is over, they’re going into pre-production. With things like Firefly and Doctor Horrible, considering how busy the creator is with Marvel, I don’t think it’s money that’s standing in the way of those projects proceeding)
If someone with more experience with crowdfunding wants to speak up, go ahead and school me on things. But these are my feelings about it right now. Maybe a lot of it is jealousy that I couldn’t whip this kind of frenzy up, but I don’t think so. I think I’m just tired of the idea that Kickstarter kickstarts anything but pre-established artists who don’t really need a kickstart.