Reunions all around for Felicia Day these days: Amid a massive fundraiser for a movie reunion of her series “The Guild,” Day is reteaming with longtime friend and collaborator Wil Wheaton for a new kind of board game TV series.
Launching as fan-unlocked content tied to “The Guild: Ren Faire’d” movie’s ongoing Kickstarter campaign (which has so far raised $5.26 million, surpassing its initial goal of $1.5 million), the new 10-episode series is titled “Conludo,” which is Latin for “play together.” Each episode of the show will feature Day and Wheaton in conversation before they pick a board game that is applicable to their topic and invite some fellow celebs to join them in play.
Fans will recognize this project as reminiscent of Day and Wheaton’s “TableTop,” a web series that ran for four seasons from 2012-2017 on Day’s YouTube channel, Geek & Sundry.
“We’ve been FOMO-ing for over a decade, and we just want to play again, especially with some of those new content creators,” Day tells Variety. “Some of them I’ve met in the last couple years, and I want to play with them at the table. It’s a wonderful world to be in and I have faith that hopefully the show can last for a long time, and we highlight tons of different products and people from all walks of life, and that’s what I love about the web.”
Variety has confirmed exclusively that newly booked “Conludo” guest stars include Todd Stashwick, Anjali Bhimani, Grace Helbig, Mamrie Hart and John Ross Bowie. And this show will be more about Day, Wheaton and those guests than the games they play.
“With ‘TableTop,’ it was important to me that we showcase games that are in print, that are available,” Wheaton says. “After a few episodes, we realized, oh no, we have to tell distributors so they can up their buys because things are selling out so quickly. ‘Conludo’ will give us an opportunity to come at it differently because if ‘TableTop’ about what’s happening on the table, ‘Conludo’ is about what’s happening around the table while we’re playing the game together. The game is obviously important and fun and joyful, but it’s about the experience that you have when you’re hanging out. We can play games that there are 40 copies of in the world.”
Day says she’s excited to get back to her roots of making web content with “Conludo” amid the current popularity of actual-play TV series and “let’s play” content.
“I was really early on everything. I was told that people wouldn’t want to be watching people play board games,” Day says. “I was told that the web was not a place for narrative fiction. I was told that streaming D&D was a waste of money. And these are all things that I did first, so the fact that the actual-play world is so robust and so diverse and so well supported financially and just popular in the world now, it’s a wonderful time to come in and try to do something a little bit different because I just have a contrary nature. I always want to be first, or at least doing something that other people aren’t doing. I would rather stand out from the pack doing something different.”
When it comes to if and how “Conludo” could live on beyond the 10 episodes that will be produced under the Kickstarter campaign, Wheaton and Day are both interested in finding a home for it to become an ongoing series.
“It’s a question of whether we want to have our own channel and build that specifically, or we want to use somebody else’s platform to distribute,” Wheaton says. “And that’s something that we’re considering, and we’ll weigh and we’ll do the best thing for the audience because that’s always our first goal. It’s really important to both of us that it’s not difficult for someone to watch — and difficult can mean a lot of different things. It can mean reaching into their pockets for more money. It can mean downloading some app they would rather not have. Felicia has talked extensively about doing this in a nice, flat, democratic way that gets it out to absolutely everybody, which is another thing that very much puts us at odds with the standard business model in the entertainment industry.”
That said, Geek & Sundry founder Day says she has “no desire to create another company where I’m making dozens of shows.”
“I’ve highlighted a lot of other people as performers in the past, and now I’m all about just doing things for me and with my friends,” Day says. “‘Conludo’ really will be a focus in that area. I’m hoping that we figure out how to sustain this in as democratically available a way as possible, whether that’s our own YouTube channel or whether that’s another free-to-stream service, we’re going to explore a lot of that.”
On the topic of distribution partners, Day has made it a priority to first get “Conludo” delivered to the Kickstarter backers behind “The Guild” reunion movie project. Day plans for the movie itself, which will see Day and the rest of “The Guild” cast (including Wheaton) reprise their roles for the first time since the series ended in 2013, to release in 2027.
“Of course, our backers are No. 1. I want to make sure they’re happy,” Day says. “They get all their fulfilled goods. They get the movie first in exactly the format we promise them. We are talking to distributors about theatrical release, and then distributing past that, we’ll definitely explore other ways that movies are distributed.”
There are both digital and Blu-ray editions offered as part of the Kickstarter campaign, and Day says it was the Blu-ray option that “put us over the top” in funding.
“Our fans loved the Blu-ray; it was the minimum requested thing,” Day says. “I didn’t want to fulfill things in two ways, but everybody was OK paying extra shipping, so we’re going to offer that, and it will be available. I do believe that there will still be a different version of the Blu-ray out there in some form and stores, but it will not be this exclusive version that will include extra things.”
“The Guild: Ren Faire’d” Kickstarter campaign runs through Friday and is currently on track to surpass the “Veronica Mars” movie (which raised $5.7 million in 2013) to break the record for the largest crowdfunded film. But Day says they’re going to need all that funding to make the movie she envisions, as the project was recently denied a California tax credit.
“We didn’t make it past the first round,” Day says. “We definitely went through all the hoops but it is a very arcane situation. The simple thing is if we said we were going to shoot the majority of the movie in Georgia, we would get the tax credits and sell them to a big company immediately to have the money. So it is such an easy process.”
Day adds she believes the denial involved “something about the number of jobs that we would create” in comparison to other projects.
“I’ve talked to many other productions who have not gotten it, and I can’t name people, but they had A-list stars in them,” Day says. “There was an A-list showrunner, the first round they were knocked out. Having learned that only 5% of the money goes to anything under $10 million, that category is extremely competitive.”
Per the California Film Commission, 5% (or $37.5 million) of the allotted film and TV tax credit funds is earmarked for independent projects under $10 million and another 5% goes to independents above $10 million.
Day believes the credit “should be automatic for anything under $5 million or $10 million.”
“That is the way you revitalize this industry, not hoarding all the money for a couple $500 million projects where A-list stars are benefiting and A-list producers and big studios are benefiting, and then indies just don’t have a chance to stay in L.A.,” Day says. “I don’t want to move to Atlanta for two months, so I’m going to have to rewrite my script to make it work here. And if I can’t, then we’ll have to do something. But the fact that it’s so difficult and the price difference is so much is very upsetting.”
Day continued: “In addition, the California tax credit is not a credit that you get immediately, unlike other states. So essentially, you get the tax rebate — like we would get it in March of 2028, whatever money we would have gotten. Which means, as an independent creator, I would have had to take a loan out to float my production to be able to actually use the money when I need it, which means people are charging up to 20%, 30%, 40% of that money to be able to defer payment. So the mechanics of it are so unfriendly, especially to people who are independent and don’t have millions of dollars in a bank to float that it’s impossible. There’s no way that independent film will ever flourish in the home of film, and that is very sad to me.”