ABSTRACT
Film and television are distinct media, each possessing a distinguished history, as well as different production contexts and industrial infrastructures that lend themselves to divergent approaches to authorship, consumption, fandom, genre and storytelling. When considering this approach to adaptation in relation to cult media, the concept becomes somewhat complicated. It is not that cult film and television cannot make the transition across media, in fact many of the titles listed earlier would be considered cult. Adapting a cult television series to cinema does not necessarily guarantee that the film will share the series’ cult appeal, as the nature of cult is often defined quite differently depending upon the media. Most cult scholars agree that the cult-ness of a text, whether film or television, is partly defined by the actions and behaviour of its audience rather than something that is necessarily embedded within a text.
