On ‘Veronica Mars,’ Kickstarter, and the Power of LoVe

MANILA, Philippines - We live in what is currently being called a Golden Age of Television.

The medium’s format has been extensively played with over the last few years, and because of its newfound accessibility and distribution (read: the Internet), many TV series, from the mainstream to the obscure, have been gaining more exposure than was previously possible. No longer is it the pastime of the loner geek who has nothing else to do on a Friday night.

T.V. Talk is now a staple in social gatherings, a way for people to quietly judge others or flex their pop cultural guns for a while. Its upswing in popularity may be attributed to the fact that we are now given the freedom to enjoy episodes when we want, and most of us choose to indulge.

But what happens when you run out of episodes and are left with a yearning for closure? You rally for a movie, of course.

Narrative continuation, post-mortem, isn’t a new idea in T.V. Land. Buffy did it with a cross-over (Angel aired in the middle of Buffy’s run) and ran the eighth season in comic form, and Firefly — which Fox originally aired with episodes out of order — came back with a feature film called Serenity, filled with all the answers that we all just needed to know, damn it.

Other shows like Twin Peaks and even Futurama continued to live on in the movies, so what makes the new Veronica Mars movie different from everything else?

Well, the fans made them do it. They even helped foot the bill.

In this strange time of crowd-funding, where people actually want to pay for things that they like, Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas went on Kickstarter.com with an idea. Warner Bros., who owns Veronica Mars, agreed to help with the potential film’s distribution if they raised enough money. For the small price of $2 million, fans can avail of an epilogue to wash away the bitter taste of ambiguity left by the events of the show’s third and final season.

Talk of a Veronica Mars film, with girl detective Veronica as an FBI agent, started circulating the fan base shortly after the series’ inevitable demise back in 2007, but it never saw the light of day. The new film being proposed by Thomas and his team involves a 10-year high school reunion and the seemingly stable law graduate Veronica getting jolted out of her peaceful new life by none other than her perpetually troubled high school sweetheart, Logan Echolls.

Proving that very little can stand in the way of a Neptune reunion, specifically of the Lo/Ve variety, the Veronica Mars Movie Kickstarter Project reached its $2 million goal in less than 11 hours, the fastest to do so in Kickstarter history. The backing period of about a month rounded out the total pledge amount to $5.7 million, proving that it’s possible to get things made if you want it enough.

Thomas, with his cast and crew sent sporadic updates to Kickstarter backers during production, and even after the movie premiered. Roughly around a year later, the Veronica Mars movie was finally here.

The first really rough patch with the movie was met with the digital download of the actual film, which was facilitated by Warner Bros.-owned Flixster. It didn’t do its job very well, so panicked fans pushed the Veronica Mars team for a better way to access the film, even though it was already available for download, involving pirates of the non-Neptune kind. “Yes, but where can I access it legally?” cried the hordes of fans cockblocked by their Internet connection. The movie was then made available via iTunes and Amazon, and existing backers who had already paid for the movie and chose to download from either got a partial refund.

The film, which was also shown in a total of 291 theaters, earned over $2 million after the first weekend from its release. Although the response to the movie was largely positive, a lot of the actual responses are from fans themselves. Does it work as an actual, stand-alone movie? The naysayer in me is a little hesitant, but as a fan, it was a joyous experience just to see all of the familiar faces again.

Talks of a possible sequel, as well as a series of novels (“Canon,” sayeth Mr. Thomas), are underway. It looks like we haven’t seen the last of the super sleuthy Veronica just yet. The Veronica Mars Movie Kickstarter Project was, among other things, proof that if you build it, they will come. Especially if “they” happen to be obsessive fangirls (and by “fangirl,” I do refer to fans of all genders) riddled with obsessive fangirl tendencies and wounded with the lack of closure.

I mean, imagine if you actually found out which one Harrison picked between Sam and Brooke.