I seriously doubt this movie guys to theaters. It's gonna be very limited release if it does.
It will be in theaters, although as you said for the moment they are planning a "limited" release.
Other than that, there are more than a few noteworthy things about the campaign:
- They asked permission from Warner Brothers to make the movie (since they own the "IP") and they are apparently handling distribution and marketing, I'd expect they will also likely add to the budget themselves, since the marketing headstart this KickStarter has provided (apparently beating the pope election on social media) and the sales of DVDs, iTunes downloads and similar it will generate might prove rather persuasive
- This apparently also complicates things in "ye olde' legacy industry" kind of ways though, for instance most of the rewards are capped to "US only", and they say they want to work that out for International pledgers, but it'll take a while to go through the proper channels
- This could be the catalyst needed for the "Movie & Video" category to take off in a similar way the "Games" one did with the Double Fine Adventure
- They don't seem to have exactly done their research into other projects to have this fully planned out, as they don't seem to have reacted with any "Stretch goals" or similar to offer people.
Anyway, this is a good thing and a net positive all things aside, I want to remind everyone of Tim Schafers little speech after the Double Fine campaign proved to be successful:
"If you've ever been told that you are part of a niche market, when you were a kid and you had your favorite TV show cancelled or you hear about your favorite band being dropped by the label for not selling enough and you've just been like "Why does a big company get to choose what music I listed to or what movies I watch or TV shows I watch or what game I get to play?" Now you know, they can't do that anymore. You can choose."
More importantly though, it serves as a proof of concept for other crowd favorites all around the world like Star Trek or Firefly that would likely break even these records with ease and possibly even dethrone the "Pebble Watch" as most funded KickStarter project.
And even if the studios profit from it right now, since the IPs are theirs. It just means it opens KickStarter to new audiences and possibilities to anyone. And at some point more people will ask themselves why they should give studios a large cut of the profits instead of pocketing them and making more quality programs themselves.
Netflix has already proven that they can do this outside of your usual old guard of TV and movie studios. They produced
House of Cards recently and they resurrected
Arrested Development for a fourth season.
These steps away from an industry that thrives only on ratings, quotas of certain age groups and market analyses can only be seen as a good thing, just as good as "gaming" stepping away from the greedy claws of big publishers.
