A North Texas movie podcast that doesn’t take itself too seriously finds fame on TikTok

Josh Rodriguez grew up on a steady diet of Batman movies and Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather.”

The Dallas native was fascinated with cinema from a young age. It didn’t matter to Rodriguez that he started with the DC Comics hero. He dove headlong into the movies — even exploring darker films like the 1972 Italian-American crime epic.

With that he was hooked on celluloid.

And so were two of his high school buddies.

“It started with going to movies and then spending like 20 to 30 minutes in the parking lot like joking about and making bits out of the movie,” Rodriguez said.

Today, Rodriguez, 32, has a podcast with his two friends called “There Are Too Many Movies.” Their collaboration celebrates a trifecta of milestones this summer with its four-year anniversary, 200th episode and 100,000 lifetime downloads. The show also has quite the social media presence with over 152,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok.

He is joined on the podcast by his best friends and co-hosts, Chris Collins, 32, and Alex Wilshin, 29. Every week, the trio gather at Collins’ apartment to discuss the latest films and share what movies they’ve been watching throughout the week.

“There’s content everywhere, why are we allowed to make a podcast to have people’s attention at all,” Rodriguez joked. “I don’t know. We do it anyways, because it’s for us.”

A Texas boy’s love of the movies

One of Rodriguez’ seminal movie theater going experiences was when he and his family saw “Boogie Nights,” a film set in the 1970s about the golden age of the adult film industry. He was 6.

“Arguably not the best idea,” he joked. “That’s what kind of got me into it, I was just there to watch movies with my family.”

He now has his own cinematic family in the popular film-centric podcast.

While the podcast, which the three friends started in 2019, may seem like wholesome fun between friends, they make sure to playfully dunk on one another as friends do. Whether its interrupting someone mid-sentence or making jokes at their expense, the friends like to keep things light.

Take the podcast’s name for example, a playful glass half empty or full analogy on the state of the hundreds of movie’s released every year.

The red thread connecting the friends was their love of film.

Planting the seed for the podcast, “There Are Too Many Movies”

An earlier podcast that the group experimented planted the seed that would eventually blossom into “There Are Too Many Movies.”

In 2012, the friends decided to take their normal pop-culture conversations to the airwaves and launched a show that ran for about a year. While the show was fun, it was covering too many topics at once from movies and music, to video games, Collins said.

After years of talk amongst the group about trying podcasting again, the trio put pen to paper in March 2019. Using the old show as a model, the crew focused on movies as the sole topic of the show.

The podcast was successful out of the gate, but truly hit its stride when it joined TikTok just after a year being on the air.

Since the show was recording in both video and audio formats, the crew thought they’d try out the social media platform. That move proved to be the “cheat code” and not long after joining, their downloads skyrocketed, Collin said.

Most new listeners discover the show from either Instagram or TikTok. Viewers making clips for these apps have been part of the show’s strength.

One of the podcast’s biggest clips on TikTok comes from Wilshin describing his watching of a supernatural thriller. He starts talking about how the main character sporadically has vision’s of the future, all while holding back a devious grin.

Wilshin finally reveals the show as the Disney comedy “That’s So Raven,” much to the chagrin of Rodriguez and Collins. It wasn’t exactly the nitty-gritty TV show Wilshin built it up to be.

“I’m mentally incapable of taking myself seriously,” Wilshin joked. “Which is probably more of a help than a detriment.”

And it’s not just online. A fan who worked at Olive Garden reserved a private dining room where over a dozen people met up and chatted about cinema.

“Once those numbers turned into people that we were interacting with, I felt like we had a bunch of best friends we’ve never met,” Collins said. “It felt instantly more rewarding.”

“There Are Too Many Movies” releases new episodes every Tuesday on Apple, Spotify and YouTube.