Animated Feature Funding .. in the 21st Century

There's yet another new Kickstarter campaign that started today. Normally, that news isn't worthy of note. Except this new pitch is from acclaimed feature film director David Fincher (among others) and is for an animated film based on the Dark Horse comic called The Goon.

* Proof of concept video shown above

Entertainment Weekly writes:

David Fincher may be a big-name director, but that doesn’t mean his name alone can turn dream projects into reality. Take The Goon, Fincher and Blur Studio’s proposed animated adaptation of Eric Powell’s inventively manic Dark Horse comic series. Despite the creation of a three-minute “proof of concept” teaser that has been making the rounds on the Internet since 2010, Hollywood still hasn’t taken the bait. So that’s why the studio and The Social Network director are bypassing the traditional greenlighting process and going straight to the public.

With sites like Kickstarter, it’s becoming easier for filmmakers to not only raise money for passion projects, but also demonstrate the pre-existence of a market for said projects.

Apparently the video linked above has been around for a couple of years. According to the Kickstarter page, Fincher, along with the Comic's author Eric Powell and Blur Studio (the LA VFX shop that created the video above) have yet to get a studio to pick the project up. The kickstarter campaign will fund the creation of a story reel to make another run for full production support.

Movie studios are pushing projects to later start dates or pulling them all together as they scramble to find the next "sure-fire" bet to bankroll. A project of this nature, while easily showing a strong support group, "isn't a sequel or filled with dancing animals". So the creatives have gone to their fans to get the project to the next level.

It will be interesting to follow its progression and see how far this goes.