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Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, a comedy film based on the Adult Swim TV show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, premiered this past weekend. Although the duo are often criticized for their bizarre comedic styling, they have nevertheless garnered a large cult following in recent years, which ultimately led to their first major motion picture.
Tim and Eric aren’t the first TV cult icons to make the crossover from the small screen to the silver screen. Movies are often a haven for cancelled TV shows with cult followings because there is a built-in audience already dying to see what happened to their favorite characters. While these movies aren’t always financial or critical successes, they do provide one last hurrah for fans of the original TV series.
Twin Peaks – Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
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Twin Peaks wrote the book on cult TV and the 1992 thriller Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me paved the way for other cult TV shows to become feature films. This psychological quagmire served as both a prequel and epilogue to the TV series and was nigh incomprehensible unless you were a diehard fan of the show.
Firefly – Serenity
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Joss Whedon’s sci-fi epic was cancelled with a fizzle during its run on Fox, but DVDs breathed new life into the show, which quickly gained a cult following of loyal geeks. This led to Serenity, a movie sequel that served as the grand finale to the short-lived space western.
The X-Files –The X-Files: I Want to Believe
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The first X-Files movie was released while the show was still on the air, but ten years later Mulder and Scully returned to the big screen in The X-Files: I Want to Believe. The movie was a standard sci-fi mystery that felt like a longer episode of the original series, but it did give audiences one final adventure with the characters.
Family Guy – Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story
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It’s hard to believe nowadays, but there actually was a time when Family Guy was cancelled. During those dark years, Family Guy fans had only this DVD movie to get ther Seth McFarlane fix. Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story was really three separate episodes tied loosely together, but it eventually paved the way for Family Guy to return to the airwaves.
The Kids in the Hall – Brain Candy
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The Canadian comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall were famous for their sketch TV show both in their native land and in the United States. Although Brain Candy didn’t feature any of their familiar characters from the show, it did feature all five actors playing the majority of the roles—both male and female.
Strangers With Candy – Strangers With Candy
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This comedy series about a 46-year-old high school dropout who decides to return to school was re-imagined as a big-screen comedy with the original cast a few years after the original run. The movie served as a prequel to tell the story of how Jerri Blank returned to Flatpoint High.
