Marvel Starts To Podcast: Wolverine, The Long Night
The Continuing Tales of Weapon X
By Paul Grimsley
Marvel are pretty savvy when it comes to media — not many who would dispute that, right? Well, it isn’t that they don’t take the occasional misstep, such as The Inhumans, but on the whole there is more right than there is wrong.
Wolverine, The Long Night, is their first scripted podcast, stars Richard Armitage, known for playing Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit, and will be a 10 part serial.
Wolverine has come to be associated with Hugh Jackman through the movies, and maybe this is the preamble to handing over the reigns. If you look at some of his pictures Armitage he could double as a slightly younger Jackman, and he has a similar way of carrying himself in some of the movies he is in.
Wolverine is probably the greatest success of the X-Men cinematic universe, and it made Jackman a household name. The supposed last film with him as Wolverine, Logan was a brilliant end-note for that iteration of the X-Men stalwart, but one can hardly suppose that Marvel will retire the character just because Hugh Jackman wants to hang up the adamantium claws.
There have been interesting developments in the comic version of the X-Men where Wolverine became Saber Tooth and then Laura Kinney or X-23 (the girl we were introduced to in Logan), so we have been primed for the notion of change.
The X-Men franchise is very successful, and there has been enough interest to spin off 3 Wolverine movies. X-Men: Dark Phoenix is coming soon, as is New Mutants, so the juggernaut keeps rolling
Disney is in negotiations to acquire $60 billion in Fox assets at the moment, including the rights to the Fantastic Four and X-Men, which would mean they had control of all the Marvel cinematic properties for the first time in a long time.
A podcast is a genius way to keep a character rolling without having to rely on the visuals. You can keep the character front and center in a non-comics medium that with high enough production values, which this reportedly has, giving you as close to movie experience as possible.
Radio Plays, the forerunner in many ways of the Podcast kept Doctor Who alive for a good long while between Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann, and then Christopher Eccleston. But rather than just being a stop-gap this will also serve an entirely different niche audience are equally as passionate as comic book fans.
The Disney / Marvel / Lucasfilm / The Jim Henson Company / ABC conglomerate has it pretty locked down, and has changed the way in which we movies in a lot of senses — maybe they will bring the same machinery to Podcasting and change that into something more mainstream as well — not necessarily something the Podcast community will celebrate, but there is bound to be enough of an ecology for them all to survive.
Marvel, like Wolverine, isn’t going anywhere soon.
