'Veronica Mars' – Media example of Convergence Culture

This may have discussed earlier, but the recent release of the Kickstarter funded film, Veronica Mars, serves as a great example of convergence culture. Warner Brothers has made several attempts to negotiate the participatory nature of fans integral to convergence culture. Beyond their scuffle with Harry Potter fans, Warner Brothers has partnered with Kindle Worlds, Amazon’s platform for fan fiction stories that allows fan writers to earn money and Warner Brothers to hold onto their copyrights. Most recently, Warner Brothers’ property Veronica Mars was resurrected largely thanks to passionate fans for a film installment.

As Henry Jenkins mentions in a lot of his work about convergence and participatory culture, fans not only become producers of their own fan appropriations, but fans also have new outlets to influence studios about their favorite texts. While fan campaigns to save TV shows are nothing new—TV shows like Chuck or Community serve as recent examples—new media platforms such as crowd funding and social media give fans more latitude than ever before.

Originally a TV series on the CW, Veronica Mars follows the witty high school private eye, Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) as she navigates solving crimes in her community in Neptune, CA and relationships as a teenager. The TV show was cancelled after only 3 seasons in 2007. The fans of the show wanted more and last year Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to make a movie in partnership with Warner Brothers. The goal of the Kickstarter campaign was $2 million, which was reached within the first day, and fans contributed a total of over $5 million to make the film, a film which featured most beloved members of the original cast of the TV show and several shout outs with dedicated fans in mind.

The first of its kind, Veronica Mars has incited a lot of discussion about the future of film and just how much agency fans should or can have in deciding what gets made. The resurrection of Veronica Mars on the big screen was also financially profitable for Warner Brothers, as modest as the profits are. Veronica Mars takes the fan campaign to a new level, and serves as a great example of convergence culture and new ways consumers are becoming producers. What implications this model of film-funding will have for other properties is still unknown, but Veronica Mars has started many conversations of how convergence and participatory culture will influence the future of entertainment.