History

After having done written movie reviews as blog posts for a few years, I decided to start a movie podcast.

2022

I started my audio podcast “Brandon at Random Reviews” covering 2 movies per episode (after the first episode).

My format for each episode (after working out the kinks) generally would start with brief discussion of a topic before jumping into the movie.

When I got to the first film I would cover the cast & crew and some of their other credits. I also included a plot synopsis and eventually taglines.

Then I would walkthrough the events of the plot of the movie.

At the end of the first film I would discuss trivia (typically from IMDb or Wikipedia/Google), Info about box office revenue, ratings from IMDb, Letterboxd, and Rotten Tomatoes, before ultimately sharing my personal rating of the film.

Of course, I followed the first film with the second film using the same format again.

After my first season of audio-only completed in June 2023, I began using video that otherwise followed the same format as the audio episodes. But because of the significant added editing time, I eventually realized I needed to reduce everything to one movie per episode in an attempt to save time. This also resulted in a reduced plot section for each episode.

I did these video episodes in that style for a year-long season 2.

In June of 2024, I shifted to releasing shorter-form video reviews that I was hoping would be more digestible for the more brief vertical video sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. These videos generally had no spoilers and only gave a general overview of the plots.

In early 2025, I realized I missed going more in-depth with my reviews like I had previously, so I covered a few movies where I did more of an elaborate walkthrough of the plots.

In February of 2025, I ended up taking a break from reviews altogether and launched a separate audio-only podcast covering the state of Michigan. However, after a very short run I realized I missed the movies and there wasn’t that much I wanted to cover in Michigan’s history.

So in September 2025, I revived the audio-only format podcast. This time around, I decided to focus on only one movie per episode, going more in-depth with the plots each episode.

As of late December 2025, I have released 16 weekly episodes with increasingly lengthy plot recaps for each episode. I intend to carry on in this format while trying to find a way to streamline my process.