$2 million Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for ‘Veronica Mars’ movie sets record

Shortly after 11 a.m. Wednesday, Rob Thomas, creator of the short-lived UPN/CW detective drama “Veronica Mars,” tweeted that if fans would pledge $2 million by 11 p.m. April 12, Warner Bros. would put into production a “Veronica Mars” movie. The film would get a limited theatrical release early next year, and the studio would foot the bills for marketing, promotion and distribution.

A Kickstarter campaign was born.

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“The record time to $1M on Kickstarter is 7 hours. Can we top that? Can we make it there in 5? $80K to go!” Thomas tweeted excitedly Wednesday afternoon.

The campaign hit $1 million at 3:06 p.m. Eastern time — just four hours after it was launched, setting a Kickstarter record.

“We are so close . . . it has me so jittery! So Im doing the only reasonable thing to calm my nerves. #imonthetredmill-watchinghoarders,” tweeted star Kristen Bell on Wednesday afternoon.

Shortly before 9 p.m., about 10 hours after being launched, the campaign passed the $2 million mark.

Kickstarter is the company founded in 2009 to raise money for “creative” projects via Web crowd-funding. Among the many film projects that reportedly have benefited are the documentary shorts “Sun Come Up” and “Incident in New Baghdad” — both nominated for an Academy Award. Bret Easton Ellis, Whoopi Goldberg, Ricki Lake, Dan Harmon and Ed Begley Jr. are just handful of the celebrities who reportedly have patronized Kickstarter.

Thomas’s fundraiser roared out of the gate Wednesday morning; by 1:45 p.m. more than $720,000 had been pledged by about 9,300 people. That’s an average of about $77 per person. Pledges were pouring in at the rate of about $4,000 per minute.

“Veronica Mars” debuted on the now-defunct UPN network in fall 2004; 2.5 million people tuned in to the first season. The show starred Bell as a high-schooler in the town of Neptune, Calif., who moonlights as a detective under the mentorship of her private-eye dad.

When the UPN and WB networks went toes up, and the CW network rose from their ashes, the new network took “Veronica Mars” to its prime-time lineup, but the show only lasted one more season.

Apparently, “VM” fans — who, sadly, are not called Veronica Martians, but rather “Marshmallows” — have been obsessing ever since.

“Best $50 I’ve ever spent. ‘Veronica Mars’ is hands down my favorite TV show of all time!! I know every single line,” gushed pledger Tami Bereznay in the comments section of the fundraising campaign.

“I’m an unemployed, broke, recent college graduate, but I’m still willing to donate for this!” wrote the enthused but fiscally challenged Autumn Hayes, who did not say how much she’d tossed in to the kitty. “If I can do it, anybody can,” she added.

Many of the comments were made by “VM” fanatics outside the United States, who complained that the campaign had been set up to ship pledge rewards only inside the United States, which was “crippling the campaign.” (Wednesday afternoon, Thomas tweeted they were “working out thorny issues so we can include you.”)

Many of the donors said they’d made only a $10 pledge, which entitled them to receive a PDF of the shooting script on the day of the movie’s release, as well as regular updates and behind-the-scenes scoops throughout the fundraising and moviemaking.