Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen adapting sci-fi comedy podcast Bubble as an animated film
The vaunted podcast-to- film pipeline has struck again this week, with Variety reporting that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are producing an animated adaptation of Maxmium Fun’s scripted series Bubble for Sony. The satirical podcast centers on a group of friends living in a futuristic “corporate utopia,” who use a gig economy-style app called Huntr to help them hunt down the monsters that regularly threaten their futuristic enclave. The film is being described as a “mature animated comedy,” with explicit comparisons drawn to Goldberg and Rogen’s previous animated success story, Sausage Party.
The series was created by comedy writer and podcast host Jordan Morris, who’ll also be writing the script for the film. (No word yet on whether his regular collaborator, Chip Dipson, will also be involved.) Rogen and Goldberg, meanwhile, have become some of genre TV and film’s most effective and prolific producers in recent years, with credits including Preacher and The Boys. Sausage Party writers Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir will also executive produce; the two previously served as showrunners on the (very fun) Rogen and Goldberg-produced Hulu series Future Man.
And despite our jokes, the jump from podcasts to TV shows and feature films has become a lot more common over the last few years; in addition to a handful of films adapted from old This American Life stories—including last year’s highly heralded The Farewell—there have also been success stories like the Dirty John TV series, Amazon’s Homecoming, and the Comedy Bang! Bang! TV series.