Warner Brothers
A fool and his money are soon parted, especially when it’s a lot of fools and a lot of money. I wrote about the Veronica Mars kickstarter a while back with a pretty positive tone – I was a fan of the show and thought it would be cool to see a movie. But it also opened up some doors to some pretty sleazy stuff, and now that’s getting under way.
We’ve seen the dark side of crowdfunding a number of times – several high-profile projects raised a ton of money and never delivered on their promises, and then we have stuff like The Canyons, where $159,000 went towards making a reviled, unwatchable movie with Lindsay Lohan and a porn star. But, like with everything, Hollywood smells money, and the parasites are starting to come out.
Deadline has a little blurb today that a California company has launched a subsidiary specifically for filmmakers looking to fund their next movies through the cloud. From their website, which has so many animated GIFs on it that it looks like a 1998 Geocities website without the spinning page hit counter and “Under Construction” banners, we get this quote:
We help filmmakers crowdfund some or all of their film budgets. We will review with you the reward-based crowdfunding process, the latest information about what is happening in this space, the pros and cons, and discuss your project specifically. If there is a fit, we will provide you with a proposal for managing your campaign. We are highly selective as to what projects we select to represent. For a few of those (well-packaged projects) will we contract on a purely success-fee basis.
Okay, let’s be straight up here: the Veronica Mars Kickstarter succeeded because it brought in a perfect storm: it was an existing property with a devoted fan following. Star Kristen Bell has a ton of social media presence and is one of the most likable women in Hollywood. It was also the first project of its type – a major studio movie looking for funds on Kickstarter – and got press because of that. The next guy who tries it – and they’re already talking about Pushing Daisies and Terriers as other shows that might make the play for a movie wrap-up.
It’s no surprise that Hollywood likes easy money. Why do you think movies have gotten stupider and stupider? But this new thing – where the fans give you the money to make the film – is going to collapse in on itself, sooner rather than later. I’ll be roasting marshmallows over the fire of their corpses.