The sci-fi genre is red-hot these days, and fans are eager to get great sci-fi content in any medium that they can. Movies, television, gaming, books – even comics and graphic novels have been flooded with high-concept sci-fi in the last few years; one format that still has room for expansion is audio series. Amazon has invested significantly in sci-fi shows and movies for its Prime Video streaming service; now Amazon’s Audible service is getting into some high-concept sci-fi content that brings some of the best minds and talents together for the new series Exoplanet.
From the mind of show creator and writer Benjamin Percy, under the stewardship of executive producer and acclaimed sci-fi author Andy Weir (The Martian, Project Hail Mary), Exoplanet stars Anthony Mackie (Avengers: Doomsday), Ariana DeBose (West Side Story) and John Leguizamo (Violent Night) as three astronauts aboard the starship Wild Blue Yonder, which suffers catastrophic damage when it is struck by a quantum anomaly and crash-lands on an alien planet.
ComicBook had the chance to speak with Benjamin Percy, Andy Weir, and John Leguizamo about Exoplanet, why the audio show format may be a great new frontier for sci-fi, and what this series may reflect about the actual world we’re living in right now.
Exoplanet isn’t Benjamin Percy’s first audio show; his time writing comics for Marvel also included the audio series Wolverine: The Long Night (2018-2019) and Marvel Wastelanders: Old Man Star-Lord (2021). According to Percy, the combination of handling big licensed brands and doing audio shows prepared him to make Exoplanet something special.
“The thing that might have given me a leg up, in addition to my experience in the medium, is that I am used to channeling legacy properties like Star Wars, like Predator, like James Bond, like Wolverine and Batman. And I like to say that Andy Weir is Batman, in that when people go to an Andy Weir story – just like when they go to a Batman story – they have expectations. And so I was studying what Andy does and trying to ask myself, ‘Like, what is the coolest-ass Andy Weir story I could tell?’ It’s got to have a space disaster. It’s got to have communication problems. It’s got to have a roller-coaster plot and quippy humor and big-heartedness, and I put all of that into Exoplanet. But I also Trojan-horsed in a unique left turn, in that it’s a time travel story as well. So all of those things really excited me about the project.”
(MILD SPOILER) The big sci-fi twist Benjamin Percy alludes to comes when Chief Engineer Jeff Shaw (Mackie) and his virtual assistant (Ray Porter) find themselves stranded on the planet’s harsh surface and begin to pick up messages left by First Officer Becca Bang (DeBose) and Science Officer Logan Bowers (Leguizamo). However, the messages aren’t originating from current positions: Bang is communicating from a distant past, while Bowers is reaching back from a distant future. Each officer has to face challenges of the hostile alien world (and its inhabitants), and somehow work in coordination across timelines to escape.
“The world that I end up in, I get put in 500 years into the future and I end up like in a fifties community where these aliens are sweeping the streets and looking for us to hunt us down, being hunted by aliens,” Leguizamo revealed, stressing that the far-out concept for his character, Bowers, isn’t so “far-out” at all, in today’s world. “You know, some of it feels like the modern world: Being a Latin man in America right now, as so many of us are being hunted down just because some of us are immigrants, I’ve related to it on so many levels. It’s not the world I want to be living in, and America is in a place that’s really uncomfortable right now that needs fixing and some love and consideration. You know, the two – Exoplanet and modern-day America – they’re not that disparate.”
Percy and Weir were excited about how audio shows are on the rise, harkening back to classic forms of entertainment like radio serials. “Audio is just like a singular form of storytelling that is becoming more and more popular, even though it has been around for many decades,” Percy explained. “Right now we live in a multitasker society. And so to be on board with this, when everybody’s on the go, and everybody’s listening while they exercise or walk their dog or do the dishes or garden. Like, it just feels like people are hungry for stories, and Audible is serving.”
Apparently, audio was a format that Andy Weir was considering before Ridley Scott and Matt Damon’s adaptation of his novel, The Martian, became a box office hit in 2015. “Before I’d even written The Martian, in the back of my mind, I was like, ‘I could make radio plays. I could do that at home right now by myself. All he needs is a microphone, right?’” Weir said. “And I never did it, but I always wanted to, and it’s a tremendously challenging medium. You have the claustrophobia of a film script where you don’t get to just have a paragraph of exposition anytime you want it; and you also have no visuals, which, you know, is kind of like a book. So what they did was they said, ‘Here are several different authors, several different story concepts.’ And Ben’s stood out head and shoulders above the rest.”
“A central part of an Andy Weir story is problem solving,” Percy said. “So this just felt like a great jigsaw puzzle to put together. And it was going to be a total headache for myself when it came to the outlining and the challenges… But those sorts of challenges, the sort of hurdles, are what excite me when I sit down at the desk every day.”
You can download episodes of Exoplanet HERE.
