Finally fans have discovered the medium that the Hollywood bean counters will understand = MONEY! If a fan is willing to pony up some cash to see his/her favorite show/book/media made into a motion picture, then a Hollywood accountant executive type will see a vein of gold to be mined and will react. Letter writing campaigns have only worked a few times, but when money is involved that gets a business school graduate's attention.

The more we as fans do these things, the stronger the film industry will become as their is a critical lack of willingness for studios to gamble on "unknown" quality scripts or what they deem as "fringe" properties like Veronica Mars, Firefly, etc…

Power to the people!

They worked with the system the best way possible at the moment. People need to get sleazy politicians to change the system to let fans get a return on their investment and make more projects, indie and otherwise, possible.

At every step of this, though, anyone could have said 'No': Warner Bros. could have let the project lie dormant, Rob Thomas could have said that he didn't want to fund the project in this way, fans could have decided that they didn't want to fund it. Everyone is responsibility for their role in this project.

If the movie sucks, of course, there will be a great uproar, but it will be relegated to comment threads such as this one. No one burned down Hollywood because 'Robin Hood' sucked, and they would have lived if 'Prometheus' had been terrible. Likewise, fans will still go see Rob Thomas' next project, be it a 'Party Down' or 'Cupid' movie.

Also, Warner Bros. definitely does not have $2 million lying around and if they spend it, for no good reason, on a film reboot of a failed UPN drama–rather than using it to pay out a dividend to stockholders or fly out Mike Tyson and his tiger for the 'Hangover Part II' premiere–the executive who greenlit it would have had some explaining to do.

If Warner does conduct a fairly strict VOD, limited theatrical release, as is the plan, they'll still spend a bit on promotion, but it will be a negligible amount and the $2 million is a nice indicator that they might even turn a profit, and if not, at least their mailbags will be a little bit lighter for a while, until the film is released and if people hate it, the mail starts right back in again.

So the charity argument doesn't really apply — that money would more likely have been going on a new iPhone game or another bottle of wine or whatever than to AIDS research on any other day. And I'm glad you pointed out the dubious territory that the charity argument leads us into — we're film bloggers, after all, we advocate vehemently that people go to their theaters and spend money on movies. Let's not get into a moral debate over how much good anyone's personal arts/entertainment budget could do curing blindness, let's assume people can make that decision on their own. I know I do.

It also means that a lot of the furore over this was due to novelty. I'm sure others will try a similar strategy and will experience lesser returns, especially because I agree that it's almost impossible for this movie to live up to the expectations of all those fans who now consider themselves not just consumers, but investors.