A24 Inks First-Look Deal With Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries Podcast Company

A24, the indie studio behind TV shows and movies like “Euphoria,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Minari,” “Moonlight” and “Lady Bird,” signed a first-look deal with Pushkin Industries, Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg’s audio production company.

Under the new deal, A24 has the right of first refusal to develop film and TV projects based on Pushkin’s intellectual property. The companies are already in development on “a few” projects including a documentary series based on Gladwell’s “The Bomber Mafia,” to be produced by filmmaker Morgan Neville (who won an Oscar for 2013 documentary “20 Feet From Stardom”).

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Pushkin Industries CEO Weisberg and president Gladwell will executive produce projects developed through the A24 pact. Meghna Rao, formerly senior coordinator of original series and film at First Look Media’s Topic Studios, will join Pushkin Industries next month to oversee development of projects for A24.

Pushkin Industries, founded in 2018, has produced several podcasts that have broken into the top 10 on Apple’s Top Podcasts chart, including Gladwell’s “Revisionist History,” as well as “Against the Rules,” “The Happiness Lab,” “Broken Record,” “Cautionary Tales,” “The Last Archive,” “Deep Cover,” “Lost Hills” and “A Slight Change of Plans.” Pushkin’s audiobooks include Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Netanyahus” by Joshua Cohen and Gladwell’s “Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon.”

In “The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War,” Gladwell uses original interviews and archival footage tell the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard.

In the years leading up to World War II, most military strategists saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists — the so-called Bomber Mafia — asked: What if precision bombing could, by taking out critical choke points like industrial or transportation hubs cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal?

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