Spotify Strikes First-Look Deal To Adapt Podcasts As Movies And TV Shows

Coming to a theater near you (maybe): your favorite podcasts. Spotify has announced a new deal with Chernin Entertainment, the production company behind films like Ford v Ferrari, The Planet of the Apes Trilogy, The Greatest Showman, and Hidden Figures, to adapt their podcast originals into feature films and television series. The deal will include access to more than 250 Spotify originals from around the world as potentials and they’ve already set their sights on the first title with acclaimed podcast series The Clearing already in the works. The pair of companies have partnered with Pineapple Street Media for the project.

“At Spotify, we believe that the extraordinary growth of audio will continue to attract the world’s great creators and make podcasts a premier destination for original IP,” said Spotify Chief Content and Advertising Business Officer Dawn Ostroff. “As we continue to expand our content ambitions, we are thrilled to collaborate with Peter Chernin, who, along with his exceptional team, are the perfect partners to help us share these stories with audiences across mediums and around the world. Together, we can usher in a new era for podcasts as source material.”

“Audio is by far the fastest-growing medium in the entertainment business, and with over 250 originals and thousands of hours of content, Spotify has one of the largest libraries of unattached IP that exists in the world today—and that library is being added to daily,” Chernin Entertainment Chairman and CEO Peter Chernin added. “This treasure trove of content plus the acceleration of new voices and stories provides an enormous opportunity to transform these addictive stories and IP into content for the screen.”

The Clearing is a true crime podcast about April Balascio, daughter of American serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards. This news comes after a few other Spotify original podcasts have already been adapted including the hit Amazon Prime Video series Homecoming with a reimagining of The Two Princes for HBO Max and The Horror of Dolores Roach for Prime Video also in development.

Though “podcast” might conjure images of discussion based shows like The Joe Rogan Experience, WTF with Marc Maron, or our own Comic Book Nation, many of Spotify’s originals are non-fiction and investigative in nature. Shows like Crimetown look into corruption in major American cities while Son Of A Hitman covers the life of Charles Harrelson, father to Woody Harrelson.

(Cover Photo Illustration by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)