Yahoo Lifestyle Get ready for more Spotify podcasts to become TV shows and movies
A new deal gives Chernin Entertainment first crack at Spotify's originals.
Need further proof of podcasting's immense cultural value? Earlier this morning, Spotify announced a multi-year deal giving the production house Chernin Entertainment first crack at adapting its podcasts into movies and television shows.
“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," said Spotify Chief Content Officer Dawn Ostroff in a statement.
According to Deadline, part of the deal involves the two companies jointly hiring a development exec to work inside Spotify, finding projects worth pursuing and helping to invest where needed to beef up scripts in development. While it's not clear if Spotify and Chernin have landed on the right person year, their arrangement has already yielded some fruit. Chernin is already working on an adaptation of The Clearing, a podcast produced by Pineapple Street Media and Spotify-owned Gimlet Media about a woman who discovered the truth of her father's hidden past as a murderer.
Considering just how popular podcasts have become in the last five years, it's no surprise production companies are mining them for new IP to develop.'Walking Dead' executive producer Gale Anne Hurd helped develop the supernatural podcast Lore into an Amazon Prime TV series that debuted just before Halloween in 2017. More recently, Netflix confirmed that it turned Hrishikesh Hirway's Song Exploder into a multi-part docuseries that features the host digging into the particulars of a single song -- just with the help of archival footage, original recordings and interviews with the artists themselves. And for what it's worth, Chernin Entertainment already has some experience ushering podcasts through the development process -- it acquired the rights to adapt Endeavor Media's Blackout, a show starring Rami Malek as a radio DJ dealing with the apocalypse, last year.
