With news today that Kristen Bell and Rob Thomas (the show's creator) are planning a Veronica Mars mini-series, we started thinking about the 2014 film.
When the original TV series was cancelled in 2007, Thomas wrote a feature film script to continue to story but Warner Brothers (who produced the show) declined to finance the project. In March 2013, he and Bell launched a Kickstarter to get funding for the project, raising over $5.5m.
The viral campaign broke many crowd sourcing records. It became the fastest Kickstarter to raise $1m and then went on to raise its original $2m goal in just 11 hours. By time the campaign closed in April 2013 it had broken the record for most backers and was the largest successful film project that had ever been financed through the site.
The film was shot in Los Angeles in June 2013, during a 28 day period with all of the original cast returning. Warner Brothers picked the film up for distribution and it received a limited cinema release within the United States with fan screenings also being held in Australia, Germany and the UK. It became the first film released by one of Hollywood's major studios to receive a simultaneous theatrical and video on demand release.
The film made $3.4 million at the box office and a further $2.2m through Blu-Ray / DVD sales. Critically, there was a positive response. It currently has an 80% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 6.8 /10 on IMDb. Despite this it failed to create a revolution of crowd funded films becoming major successes or big name directors turning to crowd funding to finance their projects.
The plot follows Veronica, recently graduated from law school, as she returns to Neptune to investigate the murder of Logan's girlfriend and reunites with her old classmates. It's available to rent or buy on YouTube if you're interested in checking it out.
