Hollywood is The Great Intellectual Property Eating Machine. Books, plays, video games, board games and more have been plundered to create new movies and TV shows. This is not a bad thing. The Shining is based on a Stephen King novel, Casablanca on an unproduced stage play and Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl is based on a theme park ride and perhaps the kindest comment a person can make in regards to the PotC films is they did a lot with limited original material. Hollywood is still gorging itself on comic books and associated IP but the relentless hunger will need something new to satisfy it – is the next great untapped resource audio dramas?
What Is An Audio Drama?
Audio dramas are podcasts that are fictional and tell a story. Similar shows have obviously existed on the radio since the dawn of that medium and at one point were one of the major cultural touchstones. BBC Radio 4 show The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy would be a good non-podcast example of this sort of show.
There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of these podcasts and leaving aside any quality control enough to keep Hollywood going for decades. In fact, there are several that have already been made into TV shows. Limetown an early masterpiece of audio drama podcasts was made by Apple TV, Archive 81 appeared on Netflix, and development hell, rumours and failed projects have stalked many of the more popular podcasts.
So will are the good and bad parts of focusing on audio dramas as the next source of Hollywood inspiration:
Pro: Quality
To be absolutely clear in any medium the gamut of quality runs from terrible to brilliant but there are truly sensational audio dramas out there. Given the relatively low costs and easy accessibility to the medium, virtually anyone can make a podcast and this has given voice to talented writers, directors etc who may never had the opportunity to make a tv show or film. Within The Wires, for example, is a continuing source of originality, drama and genuine beauty, depicting a possibly dystopian future or alternate timeline with each series told via an ingenious delivery method.
Con: Story Structure
Most fiction podcasts tell long stories. WtNV has almost three hundred episodes, The Magnus Archives around 200, and often part of the point is the long drawn-out nature of the story. Now how do you take WtNV and its 300 episodes full of characters, organisations, monsters etc and make a film about it? Inevitably stuff will be cut out, fans will be disappointed and perhaps the spirit of the show won’t be captured. And then the very nature of some podcasts – the above-mentioned Within The Wires in the second series each episode is framed as an audio guide around an art gallery…who is going to adapt that? The answer of course would be the long awaited Christopher Nolan-Denis Villeneuve co-director project.
Con & Pro: Fame
Fiction podcasts are not well-known. Even the most popular are niche. Sometimes when adapting a book or play the filmmakers see that the source material is brilliant regardless of how successful it was. Sometimes people adapt other works simply because there is a large existing audience. You will not attract a large audience simply by adapting podcasts, but by the same token, it’s probably going to be a lot cheaper to buy the rights than a bestselling novel.
The only deciding factor will be whether it is successful. If Iron Man had failed spectacularly there wouldn’t be decades of movies following in its wake. If someone adapts The Bright Sessions audio drama (therapy for people with superpowers) and it is a huge success then there will be more.
Also Read: Five Great Film Podcasts To Listen To Right Now
