After famously getting the greenlight after a successful funding campaign on Kickstarter, the Veronica Mars movie has its first trailer and it is loaded with plot information. As previously reported, the film will reunite stars Kristin Bell (Veronica) and Jason Dohring (Logan), and many more returning cast members, with show creator Rob Thomas in the director seat. The film is scheduled for release on March 14.
According to the trailer, Veronica has moved to New York, landed a job as a lawyer, and has a boyfriend who thinks the world of her. She gets dragged back home when Logan is accused of murdering his girlfriend. Veronica’s return to Neptune, California happens to coincide with her class reunion. The rest of the trailer has Veronica exchanging witty one-liners with some familiar faces as she searches for a way to prove Logan’s innocence.
While the trailer should certainly get fans of the TV show excited, the means through which this movie was funded has left some feeling unsettled. Veronica Mars has been held up as a poster child for the crowdfunding model, one of the great success stories of the website Kickstarter. Kickstarter has been used to finance a number projects for smaller companies without the backing of a major distributor or investor to provide funding, but unlike some of those projects, Veronica Mars had the backing of Warner Bros Studios. The potential success of the Veronica Mars campaign and movie could set a dangerous precedent in which large studios hold properties for ransom behind crowdfunding drives, demanding that fans prove their devotion to a property by, almost literally, throwing money at the producers. Creative minds have used services like Kickstarter as an alternative to the established system, and to many it would be a shame to see crowdfunding become just another studio tool.
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