Marvel Studios is already close to absorbing all movies into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (sort of like a movie Galactus if the MCU were allowed to use Galactus), but now it has set its eyes on a totally different medium: podcasts. As announced in a press release today, Marvel New Media has teamed up with podcast service Stitcher for Wolverine: The Long Night, a 10-episode scripted podcast that will launch in spring of 2018. The show will be exclusive to Stitcher Premium—behind the dreaded paywall, in other words—until fall of next year, at which point it will be released on other podcast services.
The show will be Marvel’s first scripted podcast, and it will revolve around a pair of “agents” from an unnamed organization who are sent to Alaska to investigate a series of murders that seem to have been committed by Wolverine. The show will star Richard Armitage as Logan himself, with Celia Keenan-Bolger and Ato Essandoh playing the agents. It will also feature Scott Adsit, Bob Balaban, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and just to remind listeners that they are listening to a podcast, it will even include a cameo from comedian Chris Gethard. Sadly, he seems to be the only regular podcast person set to appear, even though Paul F. Tompkins has a Comedy Bang Bang character that would be perfect for a superhero story like this.
It’s also worth pointing out that Marvel seems to staking a claim here by centering its first scripted podcast on Wolverine, a character it does not control the movie rights to (yet). If this show takes off, it could give the company a chance to tell more non-comic book stories with characters that can’t appear in the MCU like Spider-Man or The Fantastic Four—assuming, of course, that Sony and Fox didn’t somehow predict the rise of podcasting when they bought up those rights.