Superhero films are make-believe, and The Franchise, the latest from executive producer Armando Iannucci (Veep, Avenue 5), contends that there’s just as much phoniness behind the scenes as there is in front of the camera.
A look at the production of an entry in a popular comic book-based big-screen series, Iannucci’s comedy—created by Jon Brown and premiering Oct. 6 on HBO—skewers Marvel and its ilk with a rapid-fire ruthlessness that is the mastermind’s trademark, as well as a considerable amount of inside-baseball satire that peels back the curtain on the insanity that defines such endeavors. Casting superhero movies not as cinema but as wildly expensive content, it’s a show that’ll be music to Martin Scorsese’s ears.
As befitting such a wink-wink affair, the Oscar-winning Goodfellas director’s distaste for the popular genre eventually factors into The Franchise, whose story concerns a would-be blockbuster titled Tecto: Eye of the Storm.
Its lead is the persistently insecure and ambitious Adam (Billy Magnussen), whose worries about his performance and professional prospects are intertwined with his panic about his Doritos-shaped body (big on top, small down below) and the fact that the myriad wacko steroids and supplements he’s taking may be turning him into a goat. His frame of mind isn’t helped by co-star Peter (Richard E. Grant), a theater-trained British thespian whose contempt for this job is equaled by his disdain for Adam, whom he needles incessantly, thereby amplifying the young star’s anxieties.
Adam and Peter are the marquee names attached to Tecto but The Franchise’s center of attention is Daniel (Himesh Patel), the first assistant director, whose job is to manage this enormous production on behalf of its celebrated director Eric (Daniel Brühl), who wants to infuse his tale—about a hero with the power to create earthquakes via a power glove and invisible jackhammer—with a “subtext” about fracking.
Eric is a pretentious artist, yet more than that, he’s a striver intent on using this venture to further his career. That makes him exactly like everyone else involved, including Daniel’s brash third assistant director Dag (Lolly Adefope) and the film’s new producer Anita (Aya Cash), whose hiring is a rather unwelcome surprise to Daniel, given that they once dated before Anita humiliated him on a prior movie and then, in order to climb the corporate ladder, dumped him for that gig’s bigwig.
Making matters tenser is the arrival of “toy man” Pat (Darren Goldstein), a suit who answers directly to the franchise’s never-seen Kevin Feige-like Svengali, and whose demeanor is best described as a cross between “prick” and “asshole.” Emblematic of Pat’s untrustworthiness is his early promise to Anita that he’s not going to screw her over by laying the blame for Tecto’s failure at her feet—a lie that both understand without overtly acknowledging.
If Pat is the most deceitful player in this comedy, however, he’s not much worse than his underlings, who are constantly saying what others want to hear—and both doing what their superiors require and scheming behind their backs—in order to avoid the chopping block. That even goes for Daniel, a protagonist whose dedication to supporting Eric and keeping things moving forward is complicated, at first subtly and ultimately brazenly, by his love of superhero fiction and his own directing dreams.
The Franchise moves at breakneck speed, and its barrage of jokes is so steady that quite a few inevitably land. The series tackles everything from the ego-driven mania of, and competitiveness between, actors, creators, and producers (some of them even manifesting in each episode’s closing EPK interviews), to the stress between art and commerce, the bonkers vanity of talent (at one point, Adam asks Dag to donate her poo for a “fecal transplant”), and the need for tentpoles to reach a wide audience and satisfy the demands of the hardcore faithful, whose posts on Reddit and social media can make or break a project’s fortunes. Brown and Iannucci poke fun at these topics with a sharp stick, and they additionally make clear that Eric’s film is debuting at a time of great “superhero fatigue,” which Pat—desperate to keep the money train rolling—claims is not an illness and is a scam.
There are times when The Franchise feels like it’s shooting fish in a barrel. Still, it’s unafraid to mock the entire phenomenon of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on absurd and juvenile fantasies whose every element, when viewed from a distance, looks borderline ridiculous. During the course of Dan, Anita and Dag’s odyssey to get Tecto to the finish line (and the ComiCon stage), they encounter all sorts of amusing obstacles, be it an order to interject ill-fitting Chinese product placement into their intergalactic narrative, a franchise cameo (Nick Kroll) that causes nothing but headaches, or the ceaseless pressure to succeed while adhering to customary power hierarchies—the last of which comes to the fore early on when Dan has to suffer a public lashing from Anita so she can establish her authority with the crew.
As with the aforementioned Scorsese thread and a few jabs at the exploitation of VFX artists, The Franchise’s ridicule can be so realistic that it barely registers as comedy. Moreover, a couple of subplots might have benefited from a greater degree of lunacy, such as Eric’s assistant Steph (Jessica Hynes) falling in and out of obsessive “stress love” with an extra.
A larger problem, though, is that cinephiles are more knowledgeable about the studio filmmaking process than ever before, making the show’s dissection of its milieu occasionally too familiar to be surprising. Consequently, things are funniest when an accepted truth—say, superhero movies’ lack of serious female representation—is used as the jumping off point for spiraling silliness, as is the case when Eric is asked to “make a feminism” and no one, including the female star (Katherine Waterston) in the middle of it all, likes the idea.
As an industry send-up, The Franchise is spot-on if not always as exaggerated as it could (or should) be, even as Tecto’s production begins to collapse under the weight of various mishaps. Nonetheless, there’s enough hilarity strewn throughout its eight episodes to keep it afloat—and, more importantly, to warrant the one thing all franchises crave: a sequel.
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