Felicia Day's 'The Guild' Movie Nears Kickstarter Record
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- Felicia Day launched a Kickstarter for "The Guild: Ren Faire'd," a film follow-up to her six-season web series that debuted in 2007, reuniting original cast members Sandeep Parikh, Amy Okuda, Jeff Lewis, Robin Thorsen, Vince Caso, and Wil Wheaton 13 years after the series ended.
- The campaign had raised $5.2 million as of writing, making it the second-most-funded narrative film on Kickstarter, behind only "The Veronica Mars Movie" ($5.7 million), with three days remaining to close the gap.
- The film's end budget — after merchandising costs and fees — is estimated to be essentially the same as a single first-season episode of a half-hour streaming comedy, per Day's comments to IndieWire.
- Day said insurance requirements, film union contracts, and the difficulty of securing LA tax credits make indie film production harder than the 2007-2012 web series era, when YouTube gave her free stage access and cameras and Sprint sponsored for four years.
- A Hollywood executive's call to reboot "The Guild" with recast actors — which Day described as "upsetting" — motivated her to write the movie script herself and take it to fans for the show's 20th anniversary.
- The campaign team includes at least 12 people running a backer-only merch store, a "Guild" RPG, and a card-game dating sim "Swords & Sweethearts" featuring romanceable characters voiced by Nathan Fillion, Misha Collins, and Erika Ishii.
Why it matters: Day's nearly-record haul — more than five times the budget of her original web-series episode — demonstrates that web-native IP with a decade-plus fanbase can still command direct-to-fan financing at film scale, even as Day argues Hollywood executives have grown contemptuous of creator-owned work in favor of cheaper user-generated content.
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