Besting previous record holder Gosnell, which raised $2.24M for its telefilm about the Philly abortion physician who murdered babies born alive, Rooster Teeth‘s Indiegogo campaign for its live-action sci-fi movie Lazer Team now becomes the most funded film campaign in Indiegogo‘s history and is now the second-largest most-funded to date. Lazer Team is a live-action, sci-fi comedy that takes place in the 1970s about a secret government project that has been training a warrior to take on new alien enemies.
The record for a crowdsourcing campaign continues to be Veronica Mars on Kickstarter, which pulled in $5.7M after hoping to raise $2M for the film.
Lazer Team marks Rooster Teeth’s first foray in making a feature-length film, this after 11 years of making web content. They will start production in Austin and New Mexico in August with a spring 2015 release date that could be either Internet-based, VOD and/or theatrical.
Rooster Teeth Prods. is the studio behind Red Vs. Blue (the longest-running web series to date) and behind Immersion, which is a show that tests video game concepts in the real world. It also produces the animated series RWBY and the comedy gamer series The Gauntlet. Rooster Teeth’s YouTube channel has 7.5M subscribers and is now the fourth-most-viewed (non-music) YouTube channel in the world. They also created an annual gamer/Internet convention in Austin called RTX, which takes place every year the first week of July.
The campaign for Lazer Team began June 6 with a goal set for $650,000 but within 10 hours it ended up raising its goal and then within 50 hours, it surpassed $1M. The team at Rooster Teeth offered a number of incentives and its superfans took advantage of them. In fact, there are too many to list, but they ranged from a 20-second voicemail recording from your favorite Rooster Teeth personality to the come-to-be-expected walk-on role for the higher funders. For the highest funders of $10,000, they were given an executive producer credit; they sold 12 of those. For $6,500, you could get a co-producer credit and they sold two.
The final push took place at Rooster Teeth’s RTX which was held over the July Fourth weekend in Austin at the Convention Center where about 32,000 fans gathered from across the country. That’s almost as big as the town I grew up in. It was during that event that Rooster Teeth’s Burnie Burns received an award from Indiegogo as the Most Funded Film to date. The Lazer Team campaign ended up with 37,497 funders. By comparison, Gosnell had 26,574 funders.
The highest funded to date on Indiegogo is a for the development of Ebuntu Edge, a smartphone and PC in one device. It has raised … get this … $12.8M against its $32M goal. Wow.
Must Read Stories
Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy.