Everyone loves Kristen Bell. Whether she’s the uncredited voice on Gossip Girl, being forgotten as Sarah Marshall, an electrified hero on NBC’s Heroes or the crime-solving sleuth known as Veronica Mars. Her ability to be absolutely adorable on screen is only matched by her ability to be the silver tongued protagonist everyone wants on their side.

Rob Thomas, the creator of Veronica Mars, has been pitching a movie version of the cult TV show for a while now. Sadly Warner Bros., who owns Veronica Mars, kept saying no due to the relatively low ratings the show got (ahem, Firefly). However, Warner Bros. said their mind could be changed if Rob Thomas could prove the fan interest was there.

Warner Bros. still owns Veronica Mars and we would need their blessing and cooperation to pull this off. Kristen and I met with the Warner Bros. brass, and they agreed to allow us to take this shot. They were extremely cool about it, as a matter of fact. Their reaction was, if you can show there’s enough fan interest to warrant a movie, we’re on board.

So with that, they launched the Kickstarter campaign. Within hours they’d pulled in all the money they’d need, and then some. As of this posting, they have raised $2,165,390 of their $2,000,000 goal. That’s an average donation of $62. Not bad!

As a huge fan of the show, that Kickstarter video is the best thing I’ve seen all day.

This is the first time I’ve seen something like this happen on Kickstarter; famous actors working with huge production companies to raise money via the masses. In a way it doesn’t make sense. A production house will throw hundreds of millions of dollars at a movie that ends up totally flopping but are weary to spend $2,000,000 on something like a Veronica Mars movie?

Maybe this is just the democratization of featured film making. Netflix recently picked up Arrested Development to bring back one more season plus a movie when the networks wouldn’t because they knew their subscribers would dig it. I guess this is the new world in which we live.

There are still 30 days left in the Kickstarter campaign and at this rate there is no telling how much money they will raise. I wonder what other cult shows will get similar treatment now that we’ve seen such incredible success.

The Veronica Mars Movie Project has proven to be the fastest Kickstarter campaign ever. That says a lot about how much people want this movie to happen as well as how crowdfunding has reached the masses. I worked on a Kickstarter campaign for the Keith and the Girl podcast. While we didn’t make $2,000,000 in eleven hours, we did raise over 200% of our goal. Not bad!