Star Wreck Filmmakers Experiment With Iron Sky

from the making-movies-for-under-$200M dept

BullJustin points out to us that the guys behind Star Wreck (which we wrote about back in 2006) are trying a few interesting things to promote their follow-up movie project Iron Sky -- a story about Nazis who fled to the moon in 1945 with plans to return to Earth in 2018. To connect with fans, the Iron Sky project released some Creative Commons material for a movie teaser remix and is selling "War Bonds" to crowdfund part of the movie production. To be clear, the "War Bonds" aren't actually bonds -- just a limited-edition package (only 2,000) of keepsakes that includes:

• a 16-page book with very pretty pictures
• a DVD with the teaser trailer and two documentaries
• a signed certificate of support
• official dogtags
• undying gratitude

There are about 1,760 war bonds still available at 50€ a piece. Though, you can get some of the items separately from the Iron Sky online store (undying gratitude is presumably included in all purchases).

With only 240 war bonds sold since August 2008, the Iron Sky movie isn't going to be completely funded by fans. But it looks like the British Stealth Media Group has chipped in up to 1 million euros for worldwide distribution rights -- and the movie's total budget has grown to be at least 5 million euros. On top of that, the Star Wreck folks seem to have even bigger plans -- with a separate Iron Sky game project called Iron Sky: Operation Highjump that is looking for contributions/suggestions from fans to create a single-player video game based on the movie's background story. All of which is based on the WreckAMovie community that encourages more films to be bootstrapped and crowdsourced from a collection of both amateur and professional filmmakers.

So for much less than $200 million, the Star Wreck crew is developing creative ways to interact with their fans (and other filmmakers) to get their projects accomplished more cost effectively. They've given away free promotional materials for fan remixing. They've set up a process for fans to donate ideas and money to the project. They're creating movie accessories that get an audience excited about a movie that hasn't even been made yet. Shouldn't this be the way more movies are produced?

Filed Under: cwf, films, iron sky, rtb, star wreck, war bonds