“Batman Unburied” was the top Spotify podcast in the US, Australia, Brazil, France, the UK, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and India.
The Joe Rogan Experience is no longer the most popular podcast on Spotify.
According to The Podcast Charts by Spotify, Batman Unburied—a new narrative audio drama centred on the popular DC comics—has climbed to the No. 1 spot in the U.S., bumping Joe Rogan’s popular yet controversial podcast this week.
Batman Unburied stars Winston Duke, best known for his role as M’Baku in Marvel’s Black Panther, as Bruce Wayne, and is written and executive produced by David S. Goyer. The podcast is the first of its kind since a 2020 licensing deal between Warner Bros. And Spotify.
“”A serial killer known as The Harvester terrorizes Gotham City, but Batman is not coming to the rescue,” Batman Unburied’s official description reads. “In fact, Bruce Wayne has no memory of being the Caped Crusader at all. Instead, Bruce is a forensic pathologist, performing the autopsy on the latest victim when he’s attacked by the killer himself.”
Since inking a $100 million exclusivity deal with Spotify in 2020, Rogan has been involved in a string of controversies that have made the longtime comedian a fixture in the media cycle. He has been criticized as a vehicle for misinformation after claiming last year that young, healthy people do not need to get the COVID-19 vaccine, a statement for which he later apologized.
Rogan has also platformed the likes of far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and spread debunked conspiracy theories such as the false claim that leftist protestors in Portland, Oregon were behind the September 2020 wildfires in the area.
Most recently, Rogan was embroiled in controversy surrounding his prior use of racial slurs on his podcast. The controversy started after music artist India Arie shared a compilation of Rogan repeatedly using the N-word on his podcast, as well as a joke comparing a Black neighborhood in Philadelphia to “Planet of the Apes.” Rogan has since apologized for using the racial slurs, adding that he “wasn’t trying to be racist, and I certainly would never want to offend someone for entertainment with something as stupid as racism.”