Shameless Self-Promotion

I just finished my movie marathon box sets page. My favorite available box set is the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Phase 1) box set – complete with its own functioning Tesseract (your mileage and destructive power may vary)!

Is this really news? Nope. I’m just pleased with myself since it took a long time to get this page up and looking good. Bonus: I get a kickback every time you buy one of these box sets using the provided link. So this is a win-win between me and you.

So what are you waiting for? Fulfill your dream of owning a box with unlimited entertainment potential…while simultaneously fulfilling my dream of earning passive income.

Black Friday Movie Marathon Deal In Progress!

Best Buy is selling Bond 50 for $100 on Black Friday! How do I know? I got it! Behold the 24 disc box set in all of its glory!

Bond 50 Box Bond 50 - Volumes 1 and 2Bond 50 - Sample pagesThe 23 films are 48 hours long, and the box set comes with a bonus disc and 120 additional hours of content (video, interviews, commentaries, etc.). That’s 24 Blu-Ray discs at $4 a pop. Now that’s what I call a movie marathon in a box.

That Best Buy is selling for this price seems to be a hidden treasure. I don’t see it in the Best Buy Black Friday Ad Scan, it was not marked in the store as a special deal (it was tagged at a higher price), but yet at least one Black Friday deal watcher was able to detect it somehow. All I care is that it rang up correctly in the store.

If you are doing any Best Buy Black Friday shopping this year (2014) do yourself a favor and scoop up this gem. Best Buy is open at 8 AM Friday. Then all you have to do is find some time in the next couple days (or couple months) to get through them all! Awesome!

Quick Links: Report from a Godzilla Movie Marathon

Remember how I said a while back that the Shōwa Godzilla series would make for an excellent 24-hour movie marathon? Well, the fellas over at Flickering Myth did it! It clocked in at a brutal 26 hours and 6 minutes, and it wasn’t just Tokyo that was devastated:

The other side of the coin is that, perhaps watching 15 movies in a row is just too much. Speaking to co-founder Jon yesterday he said that if we’d split this marathon into two, he may have enjoyed it a bit more than he did. I’m inclined to agree. I don’t think we’ll be doing one of this length again…Perhaps if my co-founders had seen each film individually this could have been a different story, but as it stands I didn’t convert them to the kaiju way of cinema.

These guys have had six other respectable 12+ hour movie marathons too. I’ll have to check out their other reports from the front lines.

The Longest Film Series You Want to Watch

So what is the longest film series ever? It all depends on how and what you count. Do you count only English-speaking films? Or do you throw in a least a few foreign-made films? Do you fully consider all foreign-made and foreign-language films? What about series that have at least some entries that are direct-to-video? And how do you define a film series vs a film franchise anyway? And how do you define “longest”? Is longest defined by the  number of films or in minutes of running time?

Whew. This all sounds very complicated, so let’s start by boiling all this down to three facts:

  1. The longest film series ever is the Wong Fei Hung series, at 89 films.
  2. There are many very long movie series that you have never head of – since they are old, not recorded in English, or both.
  3. Wikipedia has a large list of film series, if you want to learn more.

Ok – the basic facts are out of the way now. What are the longest film series that you might actually want to watch, and have a decent chance of actually getting your hands on? I’ve put together my top twenty long film series list below and sorted it by total runtime (not the number of movies).

The result was interesting. Despite having 28 films, Godzilla is not the king of the movie marathon as I’ve previously reported! It’s actually James Bond, who has a 6 hour lead over Godzilla. In the nerd wars, Star Trek handily beats both Harry Potter and Star Wars, with time to spare.

Did I leave some film series out? Definitely. But the real question is: did I leave out any series you might actually want to watch from beginning to end? Comment if I did!

The Longest Film Series You Actually Want to Watch

Film SeriesMoviesHours
James Bond2450.6
Godzilla2944.3
Star Trek1325.3
X-Men1021
Harry Potter820.0
Batman819.0
Pink Panther1118.6
Friday the 13th1218.4
The Lord of the Rings / The Hobbit617.2
Planet of the Apes916.3
Fast & Furious816
Halloween1015.7
Star Wars715.5
A Nightmare on Elm Street914.2
Superman613.0
The Muppets812.9
Saw711.2
Rocky610.7
Police Academy710.5
Night of the Living Dead69.9