Kabosu, the Shiba Inu featured in the original doge memehas inspired over the past decade a cryptocurrency with a market cap of $11.6 billion, a life philosophyand one holy pilgrimage in Japan. Now, a group of filmmakers and community participants are working to commemorate the 17-year-old dog with a feature film.
Doge oriented NFT community Possess the Doge has partnered with Web3 art and culture collective PleasureDAO– who bought the image rights to the Doge meme for $4 million from Ethereum in 2021 – to produce an as-yet-untitled “documentary” film chronicling Kabosu’s rise from abandoned pup to icon world.
The film, currently in production, is directed by Jon Lynn and has been funded to date by community members PleasrDAO and Own the Doge. Despite the project's niche, Doge's origins, however, its backers hope to position the film to break through to mass audiences.
"We're looking to bring in the right partners to make this the wildest movie the world has ever seen," said tridog, a pseudonymous film producer and lead contributor to Own the Doge. Decrypt.
The film is also produced by director Lynn and New Revolution Media. This group, however, is currently courting other, more traditionally established funders.
So far, according to tridog, the project has attracted support from Jim Toth, the former Hollywood talent agent, producer and recently estranged husband of actress Reese Witherspoon. Also on board, he said, are Arthur Jones, director of the Pepe the Frog-inspired documentary "Feels Good Man," and documentary producer Evan Rosenfeld.
The creative team behind the film is looking to attract a major film distributor, such as streaming giants like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime Video.
"We plan to have a variety of partners and producers, traditional and crypto-native, to make this the best piece of art the internet has ever seen," tridog said.
However, it's currently unclear whether a traditional movie studio will want to run a crypto-native project backed by a decentralized network of numerous producers, many of whom use pseudonyms.
Tridog speaking at a TedX conference in Fargo, North Dakota in October. Courtesy: TedX Talks
This hurdle is one faced not only by Doge documentarians, but also by the many filmmakers who are currently trying to harness Web3 tools to finance, produce and distribute media in innovative ways.
While DAOs – or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations – can offer unique fundraising mechanisms and distribution channels, the reach and impact offered by established movie studios can be difficult if not impossible to replicate. These studios have not yet adopted DAO-created film projects in a major way.
Proponents of Web3-native film projects, on the other hand, believe they can offer studios an asset these companies struggle to find elsewhere: an embedded, passionate audience that has a stake in a project's success. .
And passion, without a doubt, is something that the Doge community does not lack.