Bust Out The Kickstarter: Five Beloved Nerd Series That Should Crowdfund Movies

Beloved cult show Veronica Mars is officially back. In less than a day, Rob Thomas and star Kristen Bell got the $2 million they asked for to fund a Veronica Mars movie. This is with Warner Bros. blessing, so essentially the movie is a go to be made.

This means cult shows will flood Kickstarter looking for new life. Here are five that should make the jump.

Before we begin, this isn’t yarn-spinning. Crowdfunding these movies has a huge appeal for studios because you can not only get the audience to pay for the production costs, they’re more likely to buy a ticket (you have to fork over $35 to the Mars Kickstarter before you get a copy of the movie), and they get to keep the rights. So they can make a movie on the fans’ money, sell that movie to all the usual channels (which the fans will obsessively buy), and limit their costs.

So, yeah, studios are going to run with this.

Better Off Ted

Better Off Ted, to be fair, did better than most science fiction sitcoms: It made it to two whole seasons. But it just never could get a fair shot from ABC, and sadly it seems to have gone by the wayside. But it’d be nice to see Phil, Lem, Linda, Veronica and Ted back, if for no other reason than we miss them.

Masters of Horror

Why, precisely, this strong anthology show never got a third season from Showtime remains something of a mystery. But it delivered some of the best and most troubling short horror films in recent memory: Joh Landis’ episode “Family” in particular marked a career high for George Wendt (yes, Norm from Cheers). Frankly, all it’ll really take is putting a few cult directors in the video and it’ll be funded.

Pushing Daisies

Bryan Fuller is currently running Hannibal, but fans still love his goofy, twee mystery series about Ned, a pie-maker who can raise the dead for only sixty seconds. It was a superbly made and dryly funny series that got screwed by a writer’s strike and ABC, and we already know there’s a plotline Fuller was working on, since he was turning it into a comic book: Ned fighting the zombie apocalypse.

Justice League Unlimited

We could probably do an entire list of just animated shows. But this one in particular deserves a second shot, if for no other reason than a mix of odd broadcasting decisions and odder expectations meant that it only narrowly got a chance to finish the way the writing staff wanted.

The Cape

The Cape had its weak points, but it was a sincere and often very successful attempt to reconstruct the old-fashioned superhero. Furthermore, the show was shut down just as it was starting to develop a larger mythology, and it’d be nice for the show to get a shot at seeing if movie audiences would enjoy its two-fisted, cheeky vibe. Hey, if it’s successful enough, maybe it really could go for six seasons.

We’re sure you’ve got others: Let us know what they are in the comments.

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