$6.3 Million goal has been reached and FOURTEEN new episodes are coming!
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#BringBackMST3K Kickstarter Tracker
704 Replies to “#BringBackMST3K Kickstarter Tracker”Commenting at Satellite News
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(If you’re wondering why the Kicktraq meter is showing a negative number for Saturday at this hour: we lost $5K very late on Friday, and Kicktraq rolled over to Saturday before we could fully recover it. Based on the rate that pledges have been coming in, we should be back in the black before the night is over, assuming we don’t get any more big dropouts.)
I’ve seen this happen with other Kickstarters, where larger pledges are lost halfway through the pledging period. Could be due to people changing minds or even credit card fraud.
Aw man, what did Zack Blaze say this time? ;-)
It could be people put those big donations in to help inflate the numbers early on, or it could just be that people had second thoughts about spending that kind of money on something like this. I mean, jeez, I love MST3K, but I’ve been surprised at all the folks who have donated hundreds, let alone thousands. I mean, my hat’s off to those guys, but it’s not something I’d be comfortable doing.
I think the large donations are a testament to how deeply the show has touched people. The fans have a much more personal relationship with MST3K than with other TV shows: the audiences for those other shows may be larger, but MST3K seems to be able to inspire a greater degree of loyalty and enthusiasm. Whatever the outcome of the Kickstarter campaign (and I’m still optimistic, despite the setbacks we’ve had), one hopes that the initiative of the fans does not go unnoticed by the networks and other potential outlets for the show.
Despite the slower-than-usual overnight pledge rate, we finally managed to work our way back up to where we were before the $5K pledge was pulled, so that negative number should be disappearing from Kicktraq’s tally soon (assuming we don’t lose anyone else). Kicktraq is now trending below $5.5M for the first time this campaign, but that didn’t happen until after our Friday losses, so hopefully that will go back up in time.
The official channel is starting to publicly list the host segments from Turkey day.
Cool — I’ll start watching those.
But Joel doesn’t seem to think a network will pick it up unless we get a full 12 episodes…apparently showing the “initiative of the fans” only works if we reach $5.5 million. :-?
I’m still very unclear on the concept of Shout Factory, a multimillion dollar media company, purchasing the MST3K brand outright but not having the confidence to bankroll a new series and instead leaving the entire thing up to a Kickstarter fundraiser to determine its future “viability”. As Shout Factory’s own press release states, they plan to “support the “MST3K” brand with a long-term growth strategy that entails digital media initiatives, live events, merchandise licensing programs and content syndication to international territories.” If they truly have a long-term growth strategy, is the Kickstarter itself just a gimmick to drive up visibility?
That’s what I’m starting to think…
I’m wondering if Sam Birdwater will give enough money at the last minute to put it over the top.
And I’ll be quite surprised if people get such an obscure reference.
My thoughts is they want to use to kickstarter to fund the “start-up”. I don’t think SHOUT is exactly rolling in money considering the type of movies/TV shows they specialize in are typically on the cultish side. My guess is if they can get the first season funded, then find a source of revenue to pay for the broadcast of episodes to ensure profitability, they would then be able to self-fund subsequent seasons.
I tend to doubt it’s as simple as “$5.5 million we get more seasons, $5.4 million we get 9 episodes and that’s it forever”. It’s more a case of the more money they make, the easier it is to find the support to go out there with new episodes. I would bet if the Kickstarter gets CLOSE whatever final tier goal, that then SHOUT or whoever they get to broadcast it will fund the full season.
However, I STILL think it’s important to get fans to fund as much as possible. The less that’s left on the table the more likely that it happens. (Who knows where that cut-off might be – maybe $4 million isn’t enough , but $4.5 million is.)
I guess what I’m saying is our opinions shouldn’t change. Fund as much as you can. Don’t fund more than you can afford. I’ve set it before, but I think the # of fans funding is almost as important – maybe more – than the amount of money. 100,000 fans supporting to the tune of $4 million is probably better than 30,000 fans supporting to $5 million.
What? Yahoo had its own set of host segments? Were they also the same lame duck lets-talk-to-a-Kickstarter-employee format?
No – they were even lamer talking-Joel-head intros.
I think this is pretty close to what’s happening. Joel’s breakdown is that 12 eps will cost $3.55M and the rest is Kickstarter costs. According to the most recent estimate I can find, S!F had an early revenue estimate of $50M in 2013, and had been growing that 5-10% over the previous five years. Say they keep a very healthy 10% growth going through next year, they’ll hit $66.55 in 2016. So a season would still be over 5% of their yearly revenue, which is a lot to gamble on this.
The rest of their long term growth strategy sounds like pretty standard “we’re going to license the materials we just purchased, so most of our costs will be sales & marketing salaries of people already on staff”
Kicktraq’s trend line should really be taken with a huge grain of salt; near as I can tell it just assumes the mean donation will be given every day for the rest of the campaign, which is silly. (Median or trimmed mean would be much better indicators.)
I’m not convinced the projections are much better; they have a pretty huge range between them.
Course, we also know that the numbers from the last couple of days don’t include the people purchasing Additional Rewards from mst3k.com. We know the actual numbers are higher, but we don’t know by how much.
>is the Kickstarter itself just a gimmick to drive up visibility?
Welcome to Kickstarter
This is what I wrote on the FC Boards and feel what’s happening with the slowdown:
I think part of the problem is there’s essentially no big backer reward levels left. They’ve all been bought up. For someone to pitch in 5k, 10k, 15k dollars (sadly Kickstarter doesn’t allow more than that), while the act itself is great, everyone enjoys getting some nice unique and special rewards in return. At this point, I know if I was willing to put in 10k, but there wasn’t any available top tier rewards left, I probably wouldn’t do it. It’s no one’s fault really, just that they weren’t there soon enough to back and get one of the limited rewards spot.
If they could add more high level reward options, stuff that might not cost Joel & his Kickstarter group much money to do, but could charge a pretty good amount for, it would both attract more high spenders to contribute and might even push current people to upgrade their amount.
I swear, if they offered additional tiers to purchase just normal copies of the bots, they could rack up an insane amount cash.
Or better yet, offer 20 built bots of each character, signed by everyone (even if possible including original series crew/cast members), and the top 20 highest bids for each character would get one. Have the bidding open for a week. Just watch how the ‘bidding war’ mentality would drive up the final prices.
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http://forrestcrow.proboards.com/thread/23094/mst3k-reboot-crowdfunding-underway?page=31&scrollTo=1131446
Looks like it has leveled off again. I have a feeling they’re only going to make a little over 3.3 million. 6 episodes, BUT how is that going to get others interested in backing more? Will the new cast stick around after that in the HOPES that someone will come around & fund it? We likely won’t see these new episodes for at least 6 months, and by the time the appear, and are sold, that’s probably another 6 months or more before anyone will know if the reboot is making any profits for them. So we’re talking 1 year before they will decide if any future episodes will be made. The cast, the writers could by that point have moved on to other projects.
I’m hoping for more, but…who knows?
I wouldn’t worry too much about the weekends; so far, weekends have consistently been the slowest periods. To keep things moving, we’ve been doing a little something called “The $5 Challenge”: asking every existing backer to add “just $5 more” to their pledges. If every backer did that, it would add over $130K to the campaign!
I think we’ll do better than “a little over $3.3M,” too. We’re currently just over $150K away from that, and with whatever amounts we’re able to earn today, the Cyber Monday sales, and Monday’s announcement of the new Evil Henchman, it’s entirely possible that we will surpass $3.3M tomorrow. That leaves us twelve more days to focus on the remaining goals. It looks to me as if we have a clear shot at $4.4M. $5.5M is more of a long shot, but not outside the realm of possibility.
Also you have to remember this is probably one of the worst times to do it, considering that Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be taking a lot of people’s budgets for Christmas gifts, so that we’ve gotten this far is amazing in itself. Once Cyber Monday is done and people are looking at their budget (and depending on how it goes with the Monday announcement) funding should hopefully pick up again.
Another thing we can be proud of: as Joel said in his most recent update, MST3K is now the second-highest funded Kickstarter campaign for any Film & Video project! If you click my name for the list, you’ll see that only Veronica Mars (whatever that is) netted more at ~$5.7 million. They had 91,585 backers; so far, we have 27,496. That means that, even with a smaller fan base, MST3K has already outraised several big names, including Spike Lee and several Star Trek projects. That also has to be worth something when the time comes to sell the new show.
Depends on what you mean by “a little”.
The lowest amount the KS has gotten in a single day is $28,063. If every day from here on in ties that amount, then that gets it to around $3.5M.
I think that’s a lowball estimate and it’s likely to be more than that.
And again, the numbers on Kickstarter don’t reflect the Additional Rewards purchased on mst3k.com, which Joel says exceed $85,000. That means the total is really in excess of $3.2M as we speak. And Joel said he’s planning on adding other items to the site in the coming days.
Also, keep in mind that yesterday’s numbers are screwy because thousands of dollars of pledges were withdrawn; the day started out with a deficit. So the amount pledged was actually more than the (respectable) $34,000 on the tracker.
The numbers are bound to level off, but between the Additional Rewards and yesterday’s deficit, that hasn’t quite happened just yet.
I’m not so sure; I think the reverse might actually be true and people might be more inclined to buy right now, since they’ve already budgeted for holiday shopping — and there may be folks buying episodes as gifts, too. I think scheduling the Kickstarter around the holidays and the Turkey Day Marathon was a shrewd move.
I grew up on Joel and the Bots, the switched off when unfunny Pearl and annoying Mike stepped in.
Acting is not writing. I prefer some of them writing, some acting. I enjoy them only if they’re funny and I found only Joel to be likable enough to be given a shot. He passed.
Trace, Kevin and Joel are funny. The rest are annoying rifts with annoying voices. It’s laughable to think I care about a MST3K brand…. I just want funny, likable, and not annoying,
And they’re all my personal preference, you’d vary. I’m a fan but I couldn’t care less about this lame Kickstarter smash n grab on MST3K fans.
Okay, I finally got around to watching the rest of the interstitials.
I think you’re overthinking it.
I don’t think they were being awkward and embarrassed on purpose; I think they were awkward and embarrassed because they’re not actors, they’re people who work at Kickstarter.
I agree that the decision to shoot these at Kickstarter HQ feels like a real misfire. I expected something more like last year’s segments, and an opportunity to shoot some more material with the new cast — I wonder if they were unavailable?
Man, you old-timers really DO blame everything that’s wrong in the world on Kids Today.
Don’t blame my generation for The Big Bang Theory and I won’t blame yours for My Mother the Car. ;-)
Best. Millennial. Comeback. EVER.
You win.
Er, wasn’t My Mother the Car in the mid 60s? I don’t think you could blame even the Boomers for that, much less anyone later. And it was never popular. I’m 44 and never saw it in re-runs or even mentioned as anything other than a terrible show.
Anyway, I think Ash vs Evil Dead is a great way to bridge the gap between the older, original audience and a newer one.
You have the original star as well as Lucy Lawless, but still a lot of new cast members in their 20s or so. It’s not like the “Screw you 40-somethings, we’re all about the 20 year olds) that the MST3K reboot is following.
But people were saying this Thanksgiving/holiday weekend was going to be huge, lol. Eh, still have two weeks to go, but unless the last cast reveal is Frank Conniff, I see the daily totals dropping to like $15k.
I see that the party poopers are starting to come out again. For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think we came out of the Turkey Day marathon too badly: it got more viewers than last year’s marathon, we did some respectable numbers on Kickstarter, and there’s at least $85K of ancillary sales plus other “hidden money” besides. We’re now within striking distance of the $3.3M goal, and if you look at our daily averages, we’re still on track to reach the $4.4M goal, with $5.5M still reachable.
They could sell Bots by the dozens I think.
I’m actually impressed since most kickstarters have high beginnings and ends and flat middles, but this one has managed to get some boosts along the way. Still hope they can make 5.5 before the end, but it is a very lofty goal. I’m also really impressed with the amount of funding per fan being so high. Seems like the people who back are donating generously, it’s getting more people to back that is the hard part for whatever reason. But usually there’s a good uptick in backers and pledges towards the end, so we’ll see.
My Mother The Car total number of episodes: 30
Big Bang Theory total number of episodes: 192 and counting …
Oh, man, I would be so down for that. If money wasn’t a bit tight right now, I could see myself dropping $1000 for a genuine MST3K-built Crow, even if it wasn’t screen-used. They could probably up that to $2000, and still get plenty of takers.
Another super cheap idea is simply reading a letter on-air and/or showing a picture on still-store. There would have to be some restrictions, as the letter would have to be addressed to Jonah and the bots, remain positive, family friendly, and non-commercial in nature (so no slagging off the cast and crew, demanding the return of some beloved character, or using the opportunity to promote your etsy store) Plus, as with letters in the past, they may just read a highlighted part of it if it’s too long.
Ideally, they’d only do three of these, letting all the remaining letters come from viewers who hadn’t paid to have their stuff read on the air, but still… that’s a pretty exclusive club that a lot of people would pay top dollar to join (especially for those who really want to be “on” MST3K, but aren’t able to travel all the way down to L.A. to perform in a skit), all for the cost of a self-addressed letter and envelope.
I’ve never seen My Mother The Car, but I guess the reboot for millennials would be My Mother, Whose Basement I’ll Never Move Out Of. You actually defend Big Bang Theory, I guess those dateless dork Poindexters must be really important role models for you. Awesome. (Maybe I should follow a previous poster’s advice, and ignore Thad like I ignore EricJ.)
More incentives are always a good idea.
And it does appear clear they will make the 3.3mil goal, although I doubt by the end of today (most likely by tomorrow). It’s still *possible* they will make 4.4 but at this point I doubt it, although if I understand what Joel has written that doesn’t mean only six episodes (IOW, if they get, say, 1/3 of the way they will then make 7 episodes — the goals are milestones but the money will go as far as it can).
I suppose it’s conceivable that if Joel’s last big announcement (the last piece of the puzzle of the assistant) is truly grand, it could pump things up for today’s goal, but I see that as highly unlikely, even if it IS Frank (which I doubt). Frank would excite me not so much for onscreen time (I think we’ve seen as much of TV’s Frank as we need to see) but in terms of his being on the writing staff. Now THAT would be exciting — he’s very clever and a funny guy, and having him and Joel (Joel IS going to do some writing, right?) be authoring some stuff would make me up my pledge.
If it’s anyone else — meh. Can’t see anyone being that much of a draw now that Day has joined the team (you really wouldn’t want anyone bigger, because then they would overshadow the others. In that regard, Frank would be just about perfect in that he would be a sop to the “we want some old guard on board” as well as not, in his own right, being a bigger star).
I’m hoping today’s announcement is big. If Joel is playing this right –and so far he has done fairly well, IMHO — the “evil-henchman reveal” will be something BIG. If it were Frank (or Dr. Erhardt…could that be a possibility??) — I think that would be huge enough to make a splash, giving us oldies some continuity to get more excited (and more invested). We’ve already got hooks (we hope) that will appeal to “them dang kids” (by the way, “GET OFF MY LAWN!”) ;)
I agree with ex-genius that the contribution to the writing would be the biggest draw… but I personally would love to see Frank back on the screen.
Only time will tell…
Whoever the new henchman is, it’s most likely not someone played by Frank Conniff. Someone on Twitter said that he hoped that the last silhouette was TV’s Frank, and Frank replied that “it ain’t.”
Unless Frank is employing some kind of tricky double-speak to cast suspicions off of him (for example, that Frank Conniff isn’t actually a literal silhouette, that the silhouette doesn’t represent the character TV’s Frank, etc.), we’ll see someone else appear on that Kickstarter image.
Blasphemy!
I don’t think Thad was defending Big Bang Theory, he was comparing it to My Mother the Car. And the living in mother’s basement stereotype has really gotten old. I say this as a 40+ year old person so I am not even inclined to sympathize with millenials but I think your criticisms are way off base.
It would have been nice to see Turkey Day do better than it did, but it was the fifth-highest single day so far, even without considering the “hidden money” you mention. And I think that, between the Day announcement and the marathon, we can see a sort of ripple effect; last week is the only time that the campaign has made more than $70,000 each day for 5 consecutive days.
I think $4.4M is tough but achievable; $5.5M is a longshot, but possible. I think Dub City is mistaken that we’ll see donations drop to $15,000/day; the lowest day so far is nearly double that. Today’s definitely going to be better than $15,000 since it’s already at $10,000, and we’ve only got 11 more days to go after today. The last two days, at least, will go high again, so that really only leaves 9 days for a pretty precipitous drop to get down to $15,000. It’s not impossible but I don’t see it happening.
Wait, so you complain about lazy, cliched, lowest-common-denominator comedy and then turn around and make a “parents’ basement” joke? Make up your mind!
I did no such thing. People don’t say “Don’t blame me” for something they’re defending.
That’s up to you, but you realize the guy you’re talking about was a sockpuppet, right?
Anyhow, I hoped the winky face would be enough to show that I was joking and didn’t mean any offense. If that wasn’t clear, then that’s on me and I apologize; I’ve got nothing against you and didn’t mean to come across as if I did.
I’ve seen people guess everyone from Patton Oswalt to Andy Richter, but the most plausible guess I’ve heard is Neil Casey, who Joel (and Trace) worked with on Other Space. If I were a betting man that’s who I’d put my money on.
It’s a good thing I’m not, because it is indeed Patton Oswalt.
THAT’S going to be big, guys.
I posted already in the “Patton Oswalt” post – but I am such a huge fan of Patton’s that I upped my pledge from $100 to $300 to get the signed poster. I’m tapped out though – not going any higher than that! (I wasn’t considering going over $200 until then.)
One thing to keep in mind is that anyone “established” that Joel/Shout Factory has to go to for money is going to want something in return. Not just money, but some portion of the rights (everyone is on record as saying that they got lucky when dealing with the Comedy Channel on that score) and probably creative control, which they’ve also been very lucky in avoiding. The less money Joel has to go to Hollywood for, the more this will be like the MST3K we love and remember and the longer it will stick around because the people owning it will love it as much as we do.
So while the Kickstarter isn’t going to wind up the only source of funding, that doesn’t make it a “gimmick”.
You mean the travesty that was “Americathon”? (And I say travesty because it could have been so much better had they stuck with the creators of the concept: Proctor & Bergman of the ever-wonderful Firesign Theatre.)
Yeah, for anyone who needs a refresher on how much Sci-Fi meddled with the show, take a look at Wired’s Oral History article and scroll down to what Pehl and Murphy had to say about it (you can Ctrl-F and do a search for the word “autonomy”).
I still love the Sci-Fi era, but as somebody who started watching the show in the middle of season 8, the host segments were impenetrable. Why did they keep having these skits with people in Ancient Rome? I had no idea!
And we are officially over 3.3 million! Six episodes guaranteed!
Next up- 4.4 million and nine episodes.
Yep, they just passed $3.3 million. It’s still climbing pretty good…wonder if they can get to $3.5 or $3.6 million before midnight…
(And yes, I bumped up my pledge to a full $85). :-)
I’m just going to keep my mouth shut from now on so this show will actually see the light of day… OH NO!! I DID IT AGAIN!!!
I’ll up my pledge if Satellite News changes this category to “The Revival” (since it’s clearly not a reboot).
Nah, I’ll up it anyway…
Ok, you nay sayers. You nattering nabobs of negativism. I heard a lot about ‘who’s this Jonah Ray guy?’ And ‘boo, hiss, he’s just some nerdy podcaster we’ve never heard of…’ Etc. I will now go out on a limb and proclaim him practically perfect for the role. This is based solely on listening to the lengthy interview in the podcast posted today on satellite News from MistieCast. (And a little bit of trusting Joel).
Jonah appears to be a true fan of the show, if not a SuperFan. He appears to be intimately familiar with every season of the show and cites The Movie as both his favorite film and his favorite MST3K episode. He named his first two comedy albums “this is crazy mixed-up plumbing” and “Hello, Mister Magic Plane Person, hello”. Both lines from the Movie (although I think the actual line was “Dig this crazy mixed up plumbing”…)
It’s obvious he grew up a Mistie. He gets it.
So everybody just relax.