Movies for your Ears?
It looks like Hollywood has come up with an interesting idea. Why don’t we have Podcast Movies? The New York Times is struggling to have a name for it. Can anyone come up with something?
Reggie Ugwu writes:
What do you call a podcast that presents a single, fictional story in 90 minutes? It might feel like a movie but clearly isn’t one. It recalls midcentury radio drama but involves no radio.
“You could say ‘feature-length podcasts’ but that just seems boring,” said Chris Corcoran, the co-founder and chief content officer of Cadence13, a podcast production company. “You want to exemplify the experience in a way that feels forward-looking but is still legible to the consumer.”
Corcoran’s preferred term of art, “podcast movie,” mashes two distinct categories together, reflecting the exuberance — and confusion — of this moment of media upheaval. (Movies themselves were once self-consciously called “photoplays.”)
Whatever the new form’s ultimate name, the content has arrived. This fall, Cadence13 released its first two “podcast movies”: “Treat,” a Halloween teen horror story starring Kiernan Shipka, and “Ghostwriter,” a psychological thriller led by Kate Mara and Adam Scott. A third is in progress, and others are circling similar territory. In April, Two-Up, a Brooklyn-based entertainment company (“Limetown,” “36 Questions”) released a “feature-length audio movie” titled “Shipworm,” and the children’s podcast studio Gen-Z Media published the “movie-length audio epic” “Iowa Chapman and the Last Dog” in August.
“Why does the format have to be confined to this notion of serialized stories?” said Ben Davis, a partner at the Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor, which is collaborating with Cadence13 on its features projects and represents Two-Up. “The maturation of podcasting can unlock new forms of creativity and new outlets for creators.”
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