My guess would be Firefly’s browncoats. Their canon is fifteen television episodes and one movie. By my calculation, you could watch the entire canon in 749 minutes - just under thirteen hours.
Star Wars might be a close contender. But even if you count the canon as just the six movies, you’ve got 802 minutes. And realistically, you have to add the television series and at least some of the specials.
The Prisoner (another series I thought might be the winner) had seventeen 52 minute episodes and added up to 884 minutes of viewing.
Other cults like Star Trek, Dr Who, X-Files, Star Gate, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, or Buffy don’t come close - they ran for years and the episodes and/or movies added up.
Eight movies; it’s a common misconception. Though admittedly the two Ewok movies don’t add much.
What about other media, though? Star Wars has a plethora of novels, radio plays, computer and board games, etc., and Firefly has at least a couple of comic books. What’s the conversion between books and movies? And do the radio plays count the same per minute as the movies, or are they discounted for the lack of audio? Or maybe you can only count the parts of the radio play which didn’t overlap with the movie (like Luke building his new lightsabre)?
Firefly is probably still the champ, though (unless you go into really obscure works where the “cult” consists of three fans on the entire planet) since there are hardly any spinoffs of it, either.
I clock Alien at 578min for the four films plus Alien v. Predator. Longer if you count director’s cuts but still less than Firefly. I think there’s enough Alien wonks out there to consider it a “cult” if not as much of one as the major players.
I don’t know if you count novels, comic books, role-playing games etc or even which “cults” consider them canon.
Personally, for purposes of this thread, I’d call it a large group of dedicated fans who examine the minutia of the films/shows and attempt to build a larger picture of the fictional world from it and perhaps answer for inconsistancies in the films/shows using this larger world.
Which is still pretty subjective but it’s deeper than “has a bunch of fans”.
Without looking at running length or page count, I’m saying Buckaroo Banzai.
Or, from my personal fandom, all the **Doc Savage ** books together seem to hardly add up to the word count of one Harry Potter. ( I know there was one movie, but only three other people in the world have ever seen it…)
Yeah, I was gonna say Buckaroo Banzai. Although 2001: A Space Odyssey has its fans, I wouldn’t call them a cult (and there’ve been two movies and three Clarke-authored books).
Well, there’s always the original: Sherlock Holmes. One novel, three short story collections. Movies, plays, pastiches and the Baker Street Irregulars are all built upon them. Also, while Holmes fans do appreciate a good movie version, it’s the books that they base their fandom upon.
I’m not sure how you’re counting, there… On the books, if you’re going to include the Silmarillion, what’s to stop you from also including the Children of Hurin, or Unfinished Tales, or the twelve volumes of The History of Middle Earth, or the Atlas of Middle Earth, or the Adventures of Tom Bombadil?
There’s more than that, from Arthur Conan-Doyle. I think there were actually seven or eight books, total (split between short story collections and novels); I’ll check when I get home. At the very least, for novels, I can think of A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, and Hound of the Baskervilles off the top of my head. Plus of course the many pastiches you mention, but those can’t really be considered canon.
