The Franchise Is a Hymn to Superhero Movies, Say Creators, ‘It Was Never Intended to Tear Them Down’
Sam Mendes, Armando Iannucci and more tell Den of Geek what inspired new HBO comic book movie satire The Franchise.
“I’m pretty sure that my friends at Marvel will enjoy this,” says actor Daniel Brühl about HBO comedy The Franchise. “They have a sense of humour.”
Let’s hope so. Brühl played the villainous Baron Zemo in 2016 Captain America: Civil War and in TV spinoff The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Now he’s playing Eric, a celebrated European indie director calling the shots on a superhero movie by Maximum (read: Marvel) Studios in a new satirical series created by Armando Iannucci, Sam Mendes and Jon Brown.
The fictional production is not going well. The studio keeps interfering, the story’s being kicked around like a football, the actors are bickering and insecure, and everybody’s playing paranoid power games. Welcome to showbusiness. “I never thought of Marvel to be honest, as a reference,” Brühl tells press via Zoom. He remembers being very well treated on Captain America, but did another unnamed film “which was pretty much a shitshow, a disaster from day one onwards.
“It’s fascinating to see how such a big endeavour can slowly implode and crack like a house of cards, and then when you’re in this dynamic it’s a disaster because there’s still so much money behind it you have to somehow finish it […]. It felt like being in a prison when you scratch lines on the wall and you’re counting the days, it’s soul-destroying, it really is.”
We’ve all had jobs where you have to put on a happy face, says Brühl’s co-star Darren Goldstein, who plays Maximum Studios’ walking-ego bigwig Pat. In that way, The Franchise is a relatable workplace comedy, he suggests. “It’s dealing with people you have a crush on, bosses that you don’t want to deal with, time crunches, things that you have to partake in that don’t make sense to you but you have to do it anyway because it’s part of your job…” And yet, moviemaking is no ordinary job.
The idea for the series developed after Iannucci casually remarked to former Bond director Mendes after a lunch together that there was a comedy in all his franchise filmmaking stories. The Veep creator was right, they nabbed Succession writer Jon Brown to showrun it, and The Franchise is the result. Iannucci explains: “There was something comic about people with ambitions and aspiration and talent finding that it actually counts for nothing if you’re part of this larger machine.”
“Fundamentally, whenever you do an ensemble piece set in a workplace – whether it’s in the White House, or on the stage, or on a superhero movie – in the end it always boils down to everyone trying to protect their status and at the same time trying to remain sane. It’s about showing the human beings, the vulnerability at the heart of it.”
The human beings are what The Franchise is all about, says Jon Brown. “I wrote it from a place of love and affection for these movies, it was never an intention to try to tear them down.” When an action movie has heart and laughs and works across generations, it’s incredible, says Brown. “It’s written from a place of reverence for those things, and more than that, it’s about the people who make them and what they put of themselves into the making of them.”
The Franchise’s characters put everything they have into making their movie, a low-status but high-budget entry about a secondary hero in the Maximum Cinematic Universe named Tecto (he has the power to cause earthquakes using a magic glove and a flying invisible jack hammer). Billy Magnussen plays Adam, who plays Tecto.
“What was our First AD’s name?” Magnussen asks his co-stars Himesh Patel and Aya Cash. He doesn’t want his memory jogged; he’s making a point. First Assistant Directors, such as the one Patel plays in The Franchise, tend to go unsung.
“We had a bunch,” says Cash. “Barry McCulloch,…” Patel starts to list names in his trademark monotone. Okay, so he might be able to name them, but the point still stands. The people who do most of the work on these movies get a fraction of the credit or the paycheck. “It is a thankless task,” says Patel. “The First AD has the hardest job on the planet, they get yelled at by every department.” And yet they still do it. Why?
Sam Mendes knows. “There is a slim or slenderest possibility that this movie might be really good and might be different, might buck the trend, and might prove to be the one that’s really special. This one could be The Dark Knight, or it could be Black Panther. Or it could be one that’s perhaps not so good.” Tactfully, Mendes doesn’t cite examples of the latter.
For Patel’s character Daniel, Tecto’s underappreciated First AD, it’s more personal than that: he’s a fan. He’s loved Maximum comics since he was a child and so gets off on being part of this machine, however dysfunctional it is. Daniel cares about these stories, which is what keeps him – to quote the show – “eating turds.”
There’s plenty of that on Tecto, a production that lurches from crisis to crisis. How realistic is that portrayal? Surely, at those budgets, the actual thing can’t actually be that chaotic. According to castmember Aya Cash who plays producer Anita, it’s not only realistic, but tamer than real life.
Mendes agrees: “A lot of the scenarios that they go through on a daily basis are not unusual: people getting injured, people having panic attacks, people thinking that they’re being rubbish, people not being able to achieve things, people changing their minds at the last minute, people being given last minute curveballs because they’ve lost a location or another movie has stolen one of their scenes…”
Brown picks up the thread. As part of his research, he spoke to a number of filmmakers and crewmembers on big-budget movies, past and current. He was struck by talk of the rivalries within franchises. “There’d be a movie over here that thinks they’re getting more resources or the cooler location, or that they’ve got that cool scene, and then another movie that feels like it’s being shut out. The friendly competition – or sometimes, not friendly – between movies in a franchise, is the kind of thing we researched and spoke to a lot of people about.”
It all finds its way into The Franchise, which positions itself as a hymn to showbusiness’ unsung heroes, or as Mendes calls them, “some poor bugger somewhere” who has to turn a studio exec’s announcement of a new chapter at Comic-Con, “long before they’re written or even conceived – sometimes just a title or a poster image, nothing else! – into an actual idea and then an actual movie.” It’s not easy, says Mendes. On the basis of sharp, funny satire The Franchise, that’s putting it mildly.
The Franchise airs on Sundays on HBO in the US. The first three episodes will be available on Sky and NOW from 21st October in the UK, with new episodes released weekly.
Written by
Louisa Mellor is the Den of Geek UK TV Editor. She has written about TV, film and books for Den of Geek since 2010, and for…