Felicia Day announced yesterday that The Guild is returning as a feature film, funded through a Kickstarter campaign launching this summer. The full cast is back. Codex, Zaboo, Vork, Tink, Clara, and Bladezz will reunite for what Day describes as “an adventure unlike anything they’ve ever faced before.” The Kickstarter page is not live yet, but a sign-up to receive launch alerts went up alongside the announcement, and Day’s X post broke through the noise immediately.
“GUYS ITS HAPPENING!” she wrote. “Let’s make a Guild movie together!!!! Sign up now at this link to be alerted when our Kickstarter is live. Excited to see the gang back together with your help!”
She continued: “In 2007, I created The Guild because no one in Hollywood understood what real gamers were like. I wanted to show the world that genuine friendships could form online and prove that geeks and nerds didn’t need to be clichéd punchlines, but could be main characters, too. We were able to do that for six wonderful seasons because you, the community, showed the world there was a place for it. And I’m forever grateful. The 20th anniversary is coming up in 2027 and with your support, we’re gonna do it again: Prove Hollywood wrong, stay true to what you guys love and just generally laugh our butts off. I can’t wait to get the gang back together. We’ll still be SO dysfunctional, I promise!”
The Guild ran on Youtube for 70 episodes across six seasons from 2007 to 2013. It accumulated over 69 million views by 2011 alone and over 300 million total views as of 2025. Its music video “(Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar” spent a week as the number one download on both iTunes and Amazon simultaneously. Microsoft paid an upfront licensing fee to premiere seasons two through five on Xbox Live Marketplace and Zune before releasing them to YouTube, a deal described at the time as groundbreaking for independent web content. The show held annual SDCC panels from 2008 to 2013, won over a dozen Streamy Awards, and received multiple Producer’s Guild of America nominations for Best Web Series. Joss Whedon explicitly credited The Guild as an inspiration for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, noting how Day’s fan-funded episodic model showed what independent online content could do during the 2007-2008 WGA strike.
The show launched before Kickstarter existed. Day funded season one through a PayPal donation button on the official website after production money ran out after three episodes. It was one of the earliest examples of a creator going directly to her audience rather than a studio and getting there.
Day has a sizeable email list and social infrastructure built over nearly two decades of direct audience relationships. The sign-up page launched alongside the announcement, and she has the kind of loyal following that shows up for crowdfunding campaigns from people they trust. The Kickstarter has a real structural advantage going in.
The challenge is not whether Day can find her core audience, but instead it’s whether the audience that made The Guild a phenomenon in 2007 is the same audience in 2026.
The original show landed at a specific cultural moment. World of Warcraft had 12 million subscribers at its peak. The concept of online friendships being real friendships was still treated as a punchline by mainstream culture. Day’s entire creative argument was that the people laughing at gamers were wrong, and the show proved it by building something genuine on a borrowed camera in cast members’ apartments.
That cultural argument has been won. Gaming is a $200 billion industry. Online friendships are not a punchline anymore. The specific nostalgia The Guild Movie is selling is for a time when the geek community needed to prove it existed, and a scrappy web series did the proving. Whether that nostalgia converts to Kickstarter pledges from an audience that is now in its thirties and forties, with different spending priorities than the college students and early career gamers who found the original show, is the real test.
Day ended her announcement with characteristic enthusiasm: “SO SIGN UP PLEASE F-YEAH LET’S DO THIS!” That energy has always been part of what made her popular to her audience. Whether it is enough to fund a feature film 13 years after the last episode aired, on a platform that has seen crowdfunding fatigue set in across the industry, is a different question.
The Kickstarter launches this summer. The 20th anniversary is 2027.
Are you signing up to back The Guild Movie, or has too much time passed for this reunion to land the way Day is hoping?
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