Fan-Funded Nazi UFO Movie Has Raised $7.65 Million

You must have loved the trailer for that Nazi UFO movie we showed you last week, because thanks to fan donations, the project has already pulled in 90 percent of the feature-length project’s $8.5 million budget.

Iron Sky‘s premise is that Nazis in flying saucers escaped to the moon during the closing days of World War II, and in 2018 they return to conquer the Earth. Casting for the film is almost done, and filming will begin in Australia and Germany later this year.

Though Iron Sky‘s success in pulling in fan funding might encourage others to create films in which the audience and investor are the same, special-effects guru Samuli Torssonen warns that theirs is a special case.

“We didn’t come out of nowhere,” he said. “We’ve been building our Internet community and visibility since 1999, with Star Wreck. You have to invest a lot of time and energy to win the trust of the Internet audience.”

Teaser Footage Below: Read more

Fan-Made ‘The Hunt For Gollum’ A Smash Hit: Servers Crash

A Lord of the Rings-themed fan-produced film called The Hunt for Gollum premiered online on Sunday, and within 24 hours it had had about 250,000 views, with nearly all fan comments on the Web site giving the film a thumbs-up.

The premiere was so successful that it brought down the film’s Web servers for a few hours. Director and executive producer Chris Bouchard, speaking exclusively to SCI FI Wire by telephone from England, explains, "The Web server got completely overwhelmed by all the traffic. We got it back online quite late that night. I think everybody saw the release and went on at the same time. It was the number of requests it couldn’t handle. It’s quite cool! We had no idea how many people would watch it."

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