Are you sick of Wolverine yet? No? Good – because the tale of everyone’s favorite burly Canadian mutant isn’t over yet. In fact, this new story is going to be told through the hottest new medium: a podcast.
Wolverine: The Long Night is a 10-episode scripted limited series on Stitcher Premium set to premiere in Spring 2018. Actor Richard Armitage of The Hobbit trilogy will play Logan as he unravels a mystery in the style of NPR’s famous true crime podcasts Serial and S-Town.
“If you look at the success of Serial and S-Town, it has everything to do I think with their investigative formats, the way the listeners become complicit in the narrative,” Ben Percy, the writer of the podcast, tells Mashable. “They’re co-authors, they’re literary detectives, because they’re piecing together the clues alongside the reporters, and I wanted to take a similar approach to that.”
The story begins with two agents, Sally Pierce and Tad Marshall, played by Celia Keenan-Bolger and Ato Essandoh, respectively, investigating several murders in the town of of Burns, Alaska, with their main suspect being, of course, Logan. The cast also includes Andrew Keenan-Bolger, Scott Adsit, Bob Balaban, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Chris Gethard.
“We’re attempting to provide an audio experience that feels very much like if you just turned off your television screen, but left the sound on,” says Dan Silver, vice president, head of platforms & content for Marvel New Media. “It’s very dynamic, it’s very real, it’s very raw, and it’s made for what people would expect from Marvel.”
If Wolverine: The Long Night doeswell, Marvel could look into extending this series and branching out other franchises into podcasts. A Jessica Jones podcast would slip into the mold of a true crime podcast exceptionally well, and there’s enough drama in all of the Marvel franchises to make for a thrilling adventure hour all its own. The only downside is that Stitcher Premium is a paid service, and there’s no word on if the story will go up on any other podcast service with ads for free.
