‘Veronica Mars’ Fans Are Happy to Finance a Reunion

Hardly a week after Cyrus and Ina Chung had moved to Providence, R.I., to start new jobs, this married couple were standing here in a parking lot, dressed in formal clothes with the Southern California sun bearing down on them in late June, having paid a total of $3,000 for the privilege of being extras in the “Veronica Mars” movie.

Mr. Chung, a lawyer and devoted viewer of the cult television series of the same name, which starred Kristen Bell as a sarcastic teenage detective, still recalled the day that previous March when Ms. Bell and Rob Thomas, the “Veronica Mars” creator, announced that they were seeking donations to raise the film’s budget on Kickstarter, the online crowdfunding site.

After discovering that many tantalizing rewards promised to top donors had already been claimed, Mr. Chung moved quickly when two nonspeaking background roles became available.

“I think this is the most excited I’ve ever seen him,” Ms. Chung said on the set. “Even more than our wedding.”

Now, nearly a year after some 91,000 donors contributed about $5.7 million to revive “Veronica Mars” after it was canceled in 2007, and months after a whirlwind 24-day film shoot, this much-discussed movie will be released Friday in theaters and via video on demand.

After one of the first celebrity Kickstarter campaigns, the arrival of the “Veronica Mars” movie raises mysteries that even its titular crime solver — now a law-school graduate who is drawn into a murder case in her hometown — would find challenging.

What would success look like for “Veronica Mars”? Will it set off a stampede of studios reviving dormant franchises in crowdfunded projects, or was it a one-time phenomenon? Will it even work as a movie, and will anyone other than its most obsessive fans want to see it?

“This is new to me,” Mr. Thomas said from his trailer earlier that morning, “and a lot of it is outside my comfort zone.”

When CW canceled “Veronica Mars” after its third season, Mr. Thomas said, he intentionally gave the series an unsatisfying resolution, hoping the network might pause before pulling the plug.

“They told me at the time, ‘Hey, there’s a chance you won’t be back, if you want to tie things up nicely,’ ” recalled Mr. Thomas, a former college football player who has retained his muscular build. “And my view was, ‘No, I don’t want to make it easy for you to cancel us.’ ”

For the next five years, Mr. Thomas, whose other shows have included short-lived cult hits like “Party Down,” said he could not complete an interview without being asked when the show — which had never drawn much more than three million viewers an episode — would be turned into a movie.

While Warner Bros., which owns “Veronica Mars,” was willing to consider a direct-to-video sequel, Mr. Thomas said he had no interest in such a project, and the studio’s marketing surveys, he said, did not show enough nationwide familiarity with the property to warrant a multimillion-dollar investment for a proper feature film.

“At that time, I thought we were dead,” he said.

That changed as Mr. Thomas took note of websites like Kickstarter, which held the potential to convert the fervent enthusiasm of a modest audience into needed dollars for a lower-budget movie. To that point, the site was a launching pad for offbeat inventions and grass-roots efforts — Mr. Thomas had used it to give money to the indie rock band Cotton Mather for an album rerelease — and a route to Hollywood, rather than a mechanism Hollywood could make use of.

But in 2012, when Mr. Thomas and Ms. Bell were preparing to post an online video that would announce this fund-raising drive, Mr. Thomas said, Warner Bros. denied them permission to do so.

“It was as hopeless as I’ve ever felt,” said Mr. Thomas, who considered releasing the video anyway, then thought better of it.

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What he said was as important as the money that could be generated was “the heat that comes by being the first one out of the gate,” which would make a “Veronica Mars” film “the ‘Blair Witch Project’ of crowdfunded movies.”

“It petrified me for a year,” Mr. Thomas said. “I kept thinking, ‘I’m going to wake up tomorrow and someone else is going to be doing this.’ ”

Thomas Gewecke, the chief digital officer at Warner Bros. Entertainment, said in an interview that this was not a false start on the part of the studio.

Mr. Gewecke said Warner Bros. wanted the Kickstarter campaign “to be as successful as it could possibly be,” and “wanted to make sure it was set up to have the maximum chance of success.”

“Rob and Kristen had a very well-developed, clearly articulated vision,” he said. “Their relationship with the fans was strong, and the fan base was incredibly passionate.”

When Mr. Thomas and Ms. Bell’s pitch went live last year, with a goal of garnering $2 million in a month, it hit that target in less than 12 hours and went on to nearly triple that in 30 days. (Prizes and incentives offered to donors, like autographed posters and voice mail messages from Ms. Bell, surely helped, as did a tidal wave of news media coverage.)

Ms. Bell, who was speaking from the “Veronica Mars” set three months after giving birth to her daughter, Lincoln, said she was deeply concerned that the crowdfunding drive would be a judgment on her clout to carry a film.

“There was a moment when I thought, ‘Could this be a direct reflection of whether or not I’m wanted as an actress at all?’ ” said Ms. Bell, whose résumé includes films like “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and the Showtime series “House of Lies.”

“It’s a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, right in your face,” she said. (Had the “Veronica Mars” film not happened, she said, “I would have just spent the summer with the baby.”)

Still, Ms. Bell said there was something special about the Veronica Mars character, who is sharp-tongued and unconcerned about fitting in with the in-crowd, that longtime fans would want to support.

“Rob wrote Veronica as this queen of the disenfranchised,” Ms. Bell said. “All these people who were affected by Veronica, who say, ‘This got me through high school,’ were able to say: ‘I now have a job. I can give you 10 bucks.’ ”

Many of the several dozen backers on the “Veronica Mars” set in June seemed to agree with Ms. Bell’s assessment, though they had paid upward of $2,500 to play additional guests at the character’s high-school reunion.

These donors, mostly in their 20s and 30s, had watched the series in its original run or discovered it on video, and spoke of their eagerness to see the story continue. They understood that they were not investors in the movie and would not receive any potential profits, and that their contributions only covered part of its budget.

(Warner Bros., which is paying for fulfillment costs like the delivery of “Veronica Mars” DVDs and T-shirts, declined to say how much more it had chipped in.)

Andrea Cremer, a Kickstarter backer and author of the “Nightshade” young-adult novels, said she had contributed $2,500 because she wanted to see if Veronica would reunite with her sometime boyfriend Logan Echolls (played by Jason Dohring).

“It’s a big chunk of money,” Ms. Cremer said. “I was planning on going on vacation this summer, and it was like, well, either vacation budget or ‘Veronica Mars.’ ”

Steven Dengler, a Toronto entrepreneur and a founder of the currency website xe.com, said he gave $10,000 to “Veronica Mars” because it had made Kickstarter “a benchmark, opened it up to a wider audience and made it a household term.”

The financial success of the “Veronica Mars” campaign opened the floodgates on the celebrity sales pitches and vanity projects that have become ubiquitous on the site: a movie directed by Zach Braff that received additional funding from an independent studio even though it met its $2 million target; a proposed romantic comedy from Melissa Joan Hart that failed to reach its $2 million goal. But Mr. Dengler said Kickstarter users could tell which proposals were fully thought out and worthy of their donations.

In cases like “Veronica Mars,” he said, “People have said: ‘Yes, I would like resolution. I would like to see those characters come back and explore what happened to them later on.’ That’s accessible, and that’s something you can sell.”

“Other people have said: ‘Hi, I’m someone famous that you know. Give me money to make something,’ ” he added. “And it’s like: ‘You know what? No.’ It doesn’t have the same sort of resonance.”

Still, Warner Bros. was coy about discussing box office expectations for “Veronica Mars” (which will play in only about 270 theaters to start), or detailing how much it hoped to make from sales of tickets and digital downloads.

Mr. Gewecke would only say, “We definitely already view this as a big success.”

Nor would the studio say what its further plans were for “Veronica Mars,” whether as a continuing franchise of high- or low-budget movies or in some other format, or what other titles in its library it might similarly resuscitate.

“We are always looking at: Are there other properties that make sense?” Mr. Gewecke said. “Are there other new ways of thinking about how we bring titles to market?”

He added: “We look at every opportunity, case by case. We’re really pleased with how this has turned out.”

Mr. Thomas said he believed Warner Bros. was taking the right approach with “Veronica Mars,” given the size and scope of the film.

“It would scare the hell out of me if they decided, ‘Hey, we’re going to put $30 million in publicity behind it and release it on 3,000 screens,’ ” he said.

“If we made back our money and then some, that would be thrilling,” Mr. Thomas said. “I don’t expect to compete with the ‘Twilight’ movies.”

In the eyes of Kickstarter donors like Kari Sutherland, a senior editor of children’s books at HarperCollins who was 27 weeks pregnant when she visited the “Veronica Mars” shoot, there is no way the film can fall short of their fantasies.

Recalling a conversation she had with her husband, a neuropsychologist, before she came to the set, Ms. Sutherland said he told her, “ ‘You know it’s going to get made, Kari.’ I was like: ‘Yes, this is true. And we’re going to see it multiple times.’ ”

When he asked, “ ‘We are?’ ,” she answered, “ ‘Yes, we are.’ ”