Last week, the Veronica Mars movie trailer was released. Full disclosure: I backed the Kickstarter campaign for this movie.

Since I backed the Kickstarter campaign and followed the updates, most of the trailer wasn’t a surprise to me. I knew that Veronica’s 10 year high school reunion would be a major set piece of the movie. I knew that in addition to Veronica, we’d see returning characters Logan Echolls, Keith Mars, Wallace Fennel, Cindy “Mac” Mackenzie, Madison Sinclair, Dick Casablancas, Stosh “Piz” Piznarski, and Gia Goodman, not to mention others not shown in the trailer. I knew that Jerry O’Connell had been cast as the latest iteration of the jackass sheriff of Balboa County. I knew that Veronica had completely cut ties with the detective business and that the thing that would pull her back in would be Logan Echolls asking for help after he’s accused of murdering his girlfriend. In fact, the sneak peak shown at SDCC showed longer cuts of a lot of the footage shown in the trailer, including the surprise cameo by Jamie Lee Curtis.

What I’m saying is that this trailer tells us almost nothing new and yet I’m so excited by it. The movie is really happening. A March 14 release date bodes well for how many theaters it might be shown in. March is usually a box office dead zone in between the prestige movies garnering for awards and the summer blockbuster season. There should hopefully be a fair number of screens available at that time to show the movie.

There was some controversy over the Kickstarter campaign and while I understand why some people were concerned, I am glad that the campaign was a success and that the movie is happening. The fact that a major studio, Warner Bros., is involved with this movie makes it an awkward pairing with a Kickstarter campaign but I look at my contribution as a pre-purchase of a digital copy of the movie, a t-shirt, a pdf of the script, and some stickers. Petitions are all well and good but the fact that over 91,000 people were willing to contribute money towards the promise of a movie told the studio a lot more than many more people willing to put down a name and email address on a petition. While I would have preferred for Warner Bros. to straight out make the movie, I don’t believe that that would have happened and the Kickstarter campaign generated an excitement that may lead to greater success for the movie than it would have had without it . Also, I think that it was an overall positive for Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites. A lot of people backed other Kickstarter campaigns that they may not have found if the Veronica Mars campaign hadn’t directed them to the site in the first place. It plants the idea that crowdfunding can lead to results and hopefully that means that content creators with something new to say can also find success in a changing media landscape.