According to the team behind The Franchise, the world of superhero movies is not quite so structured and planned as we may have been led to believe. Jon Brown (Succession) tells The Hollywood Reporter, “People think these movies are laid out in neat phases for the next 10 years. Then you hear about a set where, in the morning, a limo literally pulls up, the window comes down, and they hand out new script pages.” Some of the stories Brown and his co-creators Armando Iannucci (Veep) and Sam Mendes (1917) heard about superhero filmmaking were so chaotic, the writers felt like they were “too silly” to actually include in The Franchise.
The upcoming Max series is described as a workplace comedy—it’s just that the workplace involves a lot of green screens and superhero suits. Billy Magnussen (Made for Love) is the star of the fictional movie Tecto; Daniel Brühl plays the director of said film. Aya Cash (You’re the Worst) plays a producer, Richard E. Grant (Saltburn) a snobby British actor, Himesh Patel (Station Eleven) the first assistant director, and Lolly Adefope (Ghosts) his mentee.
(It’s clearly important that Grant is a snobby British actor: Iannucci says, “In the U.K., you can’t move without bumping into an actor who has spent the last 18 months trapped in a small green room pretending to wrestle with aliens and being paid very well while going quite mad.”)
Between Brown and Iannucci, it seems like The Franchise could have very sharp teeth, but the creators aren’t just focused on sending up a bazillion-dollar industry. “The beating heart of the show has more to do with the ADs, PAs, the script supervisors, line producers and crew who actually make films and get no public praise for it,” Brown tells THR. A lot—a lot—of people do a lot of often-invisible work on big-budget films, and while The Franchise pokes fun at the absurdity, it clearly also understands all the work that most viewers never see.
That said, Brown, Iannucci, and Mendes have heard some really weird stories about how certain franchise films actually get made. To read more of them, pop over to The Hollywood Reporter. The Franchise premieres October 6th on Max.
