Fans of cancelled TV series Veronica Mars have raised $2 million to help bring the show about a young private investigator to the big screen.
More than 30,000 people donated money within 24 hours of a “crowd-sourcing” campaign being launched.
“The more money we raise, the cooler movie we can make,” series creator Rob Thomas wrote in his appeal to fans.
Veronica Mars show, starring Kristen Bell as a young sleuth, ended its three-season run in 2007.
The movie project is the fastest to reach $1 million on the Kickstarter site, reaching the figure in four hours and 24 minutes.
According to a spokesman for the website, the project is the most successful so far to have obtained funding through via crowd-sourcing – the practice of raising ideas, services or money via the internet.
Others to have benefited from similar campaigns include animated films The Goon, which raised $442,000, and Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, for which $406,000 was pledged by fans.
Rob Thomas said he had struck a deal with Warner Bros to make a movie, provided he could raise $2 million by April 12 through the online campaign.
He said the studio had given the project its blessing, having previously declined to fund it after the original TV show was cancelled.
“Their reaction was, if you can show there’s enough fan interest to warrant a movie, we’re on board,” Rob Thomas wrote on the film’s donation page.
Fans of cancelled TV series Veronica Mars have raised $2 million to help bring the show to the big screen
Kristen Bell and other cast members will begin production in the summer ahead of a likely limited release in 2014.
“You have banded together like the sassy little honey badgers you are and made this possibility happen,” said Kristen Bell in her own online message, promising fans the “sleuthiest, snarkiest” movie possible.
First broadcast in 2004, Veronica Mars told of a high-school student who moves on to college while moonlighting as a private investigator.
The show averaged between 2.2 million and 2.5 million viewers when it aired on the UPN channel, now defunct, and the CW network.
Backers of the film will receive a variety of rewards for pledging cash, including a copy of the script, to be sent on the day the film is released, and naming rights to a character.
A contributor who donated $10,000 snapped up the opportunity to appear in the film.
Crowd-sourcing has become a way for film-makers, video-game developers and other “creatives” to get funding for projects that can be hard to obtain.
At last month’s Academy Awards, documentary short Inocente, which received $52,000 from 300 contributors, became the first Kickstarter-funded film to win an Oscar.
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Kristen Bell had a special guest at her last summer birthday party, her favorite animal, a sloth.
The actress appeared on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” with home video footage from her 31st birthday party, disclosing an unusual and cute side of her.
“Tomorrow at 4pm you can see the sensitive madness that is the inside of my brain,” she had tweeted the day before.
She told Ellen that her fiancé, Dax Shepard, told her she would receive for turning 31 a present “no one else will ever get in their life time“.
Then, when the day came she could not control her emotions. Dax Shepard arranged for a sloth to visit her on her birthday.
“The day of my birthday, we’re sitting in the living room and I hear a knock at the door. He says, ‘Your present is here. Why don’t you go grab the dogs and go in the back room?’… I had no context for knowing what it was, but I grabbed the dogs and walk into the back room of the house and I was immediately overcome and I thought, ‘There’s a sloth near. There’s a sloth here; it’s close; it’s going to happen,'” Kristen Bell said.
“And I didn’t know how to process that, because my entire life had been waiting for this moment,” she added.
It was all too much and she curled up on her bed and wept.
“I was sitting on my bed, knowing that my sloth is here, and I start to have a full-fledged panic attack. I don’t know how to compete with all this emotion so I just kind of crawl up on the bed and I’m crying so hard,” she said.
” Dax knocks on the door and he has a video camera and he’s like, “Surprise! I want you to come out into the … are you alright?”
“And he sees me basically fetal on the bed.”
“You’re supposed to see the sloth, and I’m supposed to film you but you haven’t even seen it yet,” Dax said to her.
“I knew it, I don’t know why. I knew it. I’m so excited,” she replied.
"I've been obsessed with sloths for as long as I can remember. They must be my spirit animal or something," said Kristen Bell.
Then Kristen Bell said she had much fun and joy meeting the jolly mammal, a female sloth.
Sloths are relatives of armadillos and anteaters.
“I was having a birthday party later that evening and they had set up a little habitat. Its a little jungle gym and she just hung out on the jungle gym for like three hours,” she said.
Sloths are Kristen’s great passion. “I’ve been obsessed with sloths for as long as I can remember. They must be my spirit animal or something. There’s nothing cuter than a baby sloth … OK, maybe a slow Loris. Maybe. On a good day, ” she told The Insider earlier in January 2012.
Kristen Bell, born on July 18, 1980, made her Broadway debut in 2001 as Becky Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. She appeared in a lead role in the Spartan. She is known for the role in television series Veronica Mars (2004-2007). She has received a Satellite Award and Saturn Award.
Kristen Bell got emotional over a sloth (video)
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