It’s no secret that the “superhero bubble” that emerged thanks to the overwhelming success of The Avengers and The Dark Knight has finally reached its inflection point. While audiences cheered collectively when Avengers: Endgame briefly became the highest-grossing film of all-time and Joaquin Phoenix picked up a Best Actor award for his performance in Joker, good will for stories about capes and cowls has faded. This may be due to the Covid shutdowns, overabundance of content available on streaming services, or the fact that studios are increasingly losing star talent. However, the biggest issue is the films from DC and Marvel Studios seem to leave everyone involved miserable.
Some of the most significant critical and commercial disasters within the comic book genre were rife with “creative differences.” Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was reportedly shot several times with different cameos floated before dropped entirely; Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantomania sparked serious questions about the mistreatment of Marvel’s overworked VFX artists; The Flash fell through multiple stages of development due to the crimes committed by Ezra Miller; The Marvels director Nia DeCosta was publicly chastised by Disney CEO Bob Iger for the lack of “supervision” on set of the studio’s lowest-grossing film to date.
Enter The Franchise. The new HBO comedy series from executive producer Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It and Veep) is set within the production of a major superhero franchise film that’s under pressure to meet studio demands. At the center of the narrative is Himesh Patel’s Daniel Kumar, a stressed-out assistant director responsible for conveying the ambitious vision of filmmaker Eric Brouchard (Daniel Brühl) to the cast of idiosyncratic performers, including the pretentious action star Adam (Billy Magnussen) and the quirky character actor Peter Fairchild (Richard E. Grant). Daniel’s trying to keep the eccentric cast and crew in check while producing something that’s relatively respectable; this becomes more challenging when his ex, the producer Anita (Aya Cash), is determined to simply use their film Tecto: Eye of the Storm as a means to help spin off more “elevated” projects that are more worthy of their time.
The Franchise is an expression of pent-up frustrations that many of its key collaborators may have learned from their own experiences; jokes about the impossibility of acting in a green screen backdrop and making substantial creative changes to accommodate subsequent franchise films are too specific to be anything else. Similar to Veep a decade earlier, The Franchise is incredulous that this is the reality that the industry operates with. It’s worth noting that Brühl played the villain Zemo in Captain America: Civil War and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Grant had an extended guest role on the first season of Loki, and Cash was a standout on Amazon Prime’s superhero satire The Boys. Perhaps being involved in a project intended to take a look at what goes on behind closed doors was a form of catharsis.
However, the issue that Veep faced is also one that The Franchise currently struggles with; at what point does parody become too close to reality? It’s not hard to see how Centurion 2, the “team up” movie that exists within The Franchise, is meant to resemble the show’s version of either The Avengers or Justice League. An extended joke in the episode "Scene 83: Enter the Gurgler" about a last-minute change of cameo appearances may have been funnier if it didn’t resemble the exact situation that occurred on the set of the Aquaman sequel.
Part of the reason that these “behind-the-scenes” stories about superhero movies are so compelling is that they offer an explanation for something that audiences care about. Those who found themselves frustrated by the baffling creative choices in the disastrous Joker sequel were interested in Joaquin Phoenix’s erratic behavior on set; even those who enjoy the Marvel films were shocked to learn about Robert Downey Jr.’s exorbitant payday for the next two installments in The Avengers series. The process is less interesting than those involved, and The Franchise has to convince its audience that the fictional universe that Daniel and his co-workers are assigned to “save” is worthy of their investment.
The Franchise is fixated on the production stage of these films, which is where most of the chaos emerges. The show has missed an opportunity to spotlight the communities that are just as involved in these films’ success—the fans that support it, and the studios that greenlight them. The studio executives in The Franchise are treated as an unseen evil, not dissimilar from the White Walkers in early seasons of Game of Thrones. The only comments made about the fans are derisive insults made by various crew members as they think of desperate ways to appease their audience.
One strength of The Franchise is the struggle that Daniel’s facing; is it possible to make something commercially successful that’s also personal, thoughtful, and ambitious in its own right? The question of whether The Franchise will become something greater is just as interesting as the blockbuster creative process it’s so intent on mocking.