Other than the pope business, the big news in my corner of the internet yesterday was Rob “not the Matchbox 20 guy” Thomas’s Kickstarter to fund a Veronica Mars movie project.

That this is even kind of a possibility is great news, because I loved me some Veronica Mars. In spite of it’s occasional flaws*, it was a fun, engrossing program with some great writing and plenty of gumption and it really worked it’s whole underdog vibe effectively to build a devoted fan base. That Thomas managed to meet his funding goal of $2 million in something like ten hours is really kind of impressive.

However, I haven’t quite squared myself with throwing money at this one.

Why? Because this isn’t really what I figured Kickstarter to be all about. Kickstarter and other similar crowdsourcing platforms like indiegogo are an excellent service for helping small, creative operations get going by generating seed money and working to build an audience. According to Kickstarter’s information here, the average Kickstarter project is looking to raise around $5000; just about enough to support development and do a decent print run on a book or an album or something. That average tracks with the kind of projects that I’ve backed so far; looking for somewhere between $1-$10k to get a book or a record or a game published. Most of these projects were started by someone I’ve actually met in person or at least know online. Small stuff.

The biggest project I’ve been involved with has been my throwing a couple of bucks at the sequel to The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, a project looking for 300k to make a low-budget indie comedy about roleplaying games. I loved the producers’ previous work, and we have an acquaintance in common anyway. Still pretty small on the project scale.

The Veronica Mars movie project is different, though. Sure, it’s coming directly from the creator of the character and concept, and it certainly looks like it’s going to be made on the cheap in the proud indie tradition, but in the end, the only reason this is happening is because the holders of the rights, corporate behemoth Warner Bros, is supposedly allowing this to happen. This isn’t about small, independent creators anymore. In the end, this is going to be a major studio movie distributed by WB.

This isn’t some semi-pro starving artist saying “I have an idea for a neat project, if only I had the seed money to get it printed”, it’s WB saying “show us an audience willing to pony up, and maybe we’ll let you make this.” I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea of a corporation taking a potential audience’s temperature online, but I do worry that this sort of project, and it’s apparent early success, is going to fundamentally change the game – one or two more projects like this, no matter how worthy or unworthy, and the corporate big guys will crowd the market, and not leaving much room for the little guys trying to get some songs recorded and a couple of boxes of CDs printed.

If that comes to pass, this sort of crowdsourcing will stop being about providing a way to facilitate creative people to get excited and make things, and will just become another revenue stream for the big media conglomerates. And in the end, we, the audience for those small niche projects, will miss out on a lot of neat ideas.

________________

*- flaws like the fact that I pretty much couldn’t stand any of the love interests they threw in front of the Tiny Blonde Protagonist, particularly the One True Pairing, Logan whatshisname. I just didn’t get it. That’s why I was so excited about the initial 4th season proposal, which would fast forward several years, and have Veronica working for the FBI, doing a kind of 21 Jump Street undercover thing. Oh, that short film/mini pilot on the season 3 box set had such promise. Plus, we’d likely be spared more of Jason Dohring crying all the time.