How Superhero Franchise Movies Lost Their Way: “It’s Actual Chaos”

There’s a situation discussed in HBO’s upcoming series The Franchise — a comedy about the behind-the-scenes struggle to make a superhero movie — that sounds rather absurd: A director laboring away on a fictional Marvel-like film gradually realizes the studio brass has changed their mind about the project’s creative direction and started secretly shooting the “real” movie somewhere else, while he continues to film scenes destined to be scrapped.

Yet this has actually happened to at least one filmmaker working on a franchise movie, according to the show’s producers.

“All the research we did — and we did tons, we spoke to so many people — the actual chaos [on superhero films] was really surprising,” says The Franchise creator Jon Brown (Succession), who made the series along with Armando Iannucci (Veep) and Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes (1917). “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. Or producers on set have eight versions of the same script open, and they go through each script, cherry picking lines, and then they Frankenstein a scene out of nothing. Or the studio sends an actor to the set in the morning and they basically rewrite the day’s entire scene [to accommodate the last-minute cast addition]. You would assume all this was decided two years ago, but it’s happened a lot across Marvel and DC movies.”

As a result, the writers of The Franchise found themselves in the rather odd position of sometimes making story choices for their show that were less wild than the real-life anecdotes they were hearing from industry insiders. “You think, ‘I know this is real, but it just seems too silly,’” Brown said. “So we sometimes have to take it back a step, because you don’t think people will believe it unless they know it’s true.”

The Franchise began (its origin story, if you will) when Mendes and Iannucci were having a lunch meeting in London. They swapped ideas for collaboration and none of them fit. Then Mendes — who had recently wrapped filming 2015’s James Bond hit Spectre — shared some of the “magnificent chaos” he endured directing two Bond films. “The reality of making [franchise] films is often absurd, chaotic, and decisions are made for the most random of reasons — you are balanced on a knife edge the whole time,” Mendes says. “There’s this sense of a massive engine moving forward relentlessly, and sometimes you feel like you are driving the train and sometimes you’re just a passenger as a director.”

As the two left the restaurant, Mendes recalls, “Armando turned and said, ‘That’s a show — a comedy set behind the scenes of a franchise movie.’”

For Mendes, who helms the show’s pilot, it was a chance for the director of serious cinematic fare to try something different. “These are the sorts of shows that I watch, and it always struck me as sad that I’d never been able to make a show that — when I get home and night — I actually want to see,” he says.

The two quickly realized the ideal genre to satirize wasn’t a spy franchise, however, but a superhero saga. “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,” Iannucci says.

Once they enlisted Brown as showrunner, HBO greenlit the project. Casting proved surprisingly difficult, as producers didn’t want actors for certain roles if they previously made a comic book project. “It’s very hard to find actors who can be believable superheroes — that have the physicality and the kind of tone — that [haven’t previously done] some element of that work,” Brown says. “I remember reading about Wall Street and about how it sucks up the finest minds from MIT and Harvard, and then sits them at a terminal and gets them to make these trades endlessly. A similar thing happens in Hollywood where people who are incredibly good at their craft get sucked into this machine and the work they’re doing doesn’t let them express a full range of their ability. And that’s quite heartbreaking. And it’s quite funny.” 

The result is a biting and witty workplace comedy that follows the cast and crew of Tecto, a movie about a superhero who can make earthquakes. The players include an insecure star (Billy Magnussen), an arrogant British thespian (Richard E. Grant), a frustrated visionary director (Daniel Brühl) and an ambitious newbie producer (Aya Cash). But the show’s focal point is the production’s beleaguered first assistant director, Daniel (Himesh Patel), who desperately tries to keep all the plates spinning and egos satiated while mentoring a pestering 3rd AD (Lolly Adefope).  

“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,” says Mendes, while Brown adds, “We wanted to make a show about craft people who are trapped inside a dysfunctional machine, rather than a crew of fuckups who can’t get anything right.”

The fictional production’s boss is Pat Shannon (Darren Goldstein), a brutally pragmatic executive for Maximum Studios who declares “franchise fatigue” is “not a real illness and a scam.” The character will doubtlessly remind viewers of Marvel chief Kevin Feige — he even looks a bit like him — though producers say the character is written very differently. “Everyone we spoke to said, ‘Kevin Feige is an incredibly nice man,’” Brown says. “So straight away as a writer, you’re like, ‘Fuck, that’s such a shame — be a real monster and we could go after him.’”

Yet Feige having such a hands-on role at a prolific studio is certainly critiqued. Brown suspects giving so much creative authority to one person is one source of the MCU’s struggles. “There’s a very thin funnel that [Marvel] productions go though — which is Kevin Feige’s brain,” he says. “All these decisions come down to one guy. I was doing eight episodes of one TV show and that was enough to make me nearly mad. Imagine having a slate of those movies and TV shows in your brain constantly while being told by people above you that Rotten Tomatoes scores are down, box offices is down, engagement is down.”

One of the debut season’s best episodes features producers and crewmembers grappling with the studio having “a woman problem” — too few female superheroes. It’s a situation Marvel and DC likewise have publicly, and awkwardly, tried to address. In the show, the producers’ solution is to insert an actress into the film midway through production and give her character an all-powerful phallic weapon from comic book lore, causing online fans to have a meltdown. 

“There are attempts by franchise movies to remedy shortcomings by making corrections that alienated their fan base,” Brown says. “So they have this push and pull where they would bring in empowered female characters, but it would somehow disempower male characters in some people’s eyes. What’s sad about that is you get humans caught in the middle — people like [Captain Marvel star] Brie Larson — actresses bringing some humanity to a female comic book figure that was probably invented in the 1960s, and then they get death threats — which, obviously, are not funny. But it’s insane how seriously people take these things.”

It might seem as if a project like The Franchise might have missed its ideal window — the superhero phenomena of the past two decades arguably peaked in 2019 with Avengers: Endgame and has since been on a box office slide and existential identity crisis. Yet The Franchise deftly mines those very issues, with characters struggling with budget limitations and panicking, second-guessing studio bosses.

“It felt more interesting because franchise movies themselves seem to be going through a crisis,” Brown says. “There’s a feeling in The Sopranos that you’re seeing a dying way of life; an end-of-empires feeling. That felt like good background for a show that is both a workplace comedy and a satire of this culture; a cash cow recognizing that its best days may be behind it.”

It’s also what makes The Franchise oddly more relatable compared to traditional behind-the-scenes portrayals of Hollywood productions, which often center around an all-powerful director or star. On the Tecto set, everybody feels like a potentially disposable piece of the superhero industrial complex, something producers say was reflected by their research. “[Marvel/DC] will shoot a scene with the actors on a location with a tracking shot, and then shoot it again without the actors, but with the same camera movement, just in case they want to put different actors in it,” Brown says. “And then they’ll shoot the actors again in front of a greenscreen, so they could maybe keep the actors, but change the backdrop.”

Which is like creating an actual multiverse of footage busywork to avoid making up your mind; leaving infinite options open so they can be Avengers-assembled during postproduction. “And it’s just because no one wants to commit to anything because then you can keep changing it forever, effectively,” he says.

The ultimate expression of such indecision and fluidity is what happened to Warner Bros.’ Batgirl, when the film was entirely shelved for a tax credit. Iannucci is from Glasgow, where parts of Batgirl were shot, and says the production was a point of pride for the locals.

“That was really tragic,” he says. “Even if you say to yourself when you make something, ‘I’m not going to get invested in this one,’ the minute you put the smallest piece of yourself into it, you’re already gone. You can’t help but feel emotionally connected. That’s what’s often the most heartbreaking because the machine doesn’t really care about people; it’s just a piece of content.”

In case you’re wondering how HBO’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery feels about The Franchise — given WBD has a rather massive vested interest in turning around DC Studios’ slump — the bosses haven’t griped, according to HBO’s executive vp comedy programming Amy Gravitt. “There hasn’t been a single question about it,” she says, adding, “The idea of a half-hour series punching down on the superhero behemoth is pretty hilarious to me. It’s always about the tone of the piece and when you’re doing a satire — of which we’ve done a bunch — setting the right tone for where we are in the world and where we are culturally.”

That said, the producers emphasize the series is not about industry doom and gloom. “It’s not a cynical show,” Mendes says. “There is a romance to [making movies] and a sense of hope that underpins everything, and Jon has managed to capture that.

“You have to be respectful of these movies and the people that are involved with them, because everyone is trying to do a good job,” Brown says. “People may consider these movies formulaic, but if you go to the set of one of these films, everyone is trying their absolute best to make something special.”

While The Franchise team’s mission is to satirize, not save, superhero films, all their research and efforts do beg the question: How would the show’s producers go about fixing all this?

Brown notes Marvel’s 2008 breakout Iron Man succeeded because it was made with a level of creative freedom and lack of parent company oversight that doesn’t exist for such projects today. “They were able to make editorial and casting choices that were completely their own decisions,” he says. “I feel like their relationship with their fan base has flipped, where instead of telling fans very confidently, ‘This is the movie and this is our way,’ it seems like they’ve gotten themselves into a position where they’re trying to chase a fan base that was more engaged in the previous phases than it currently is. When you start doing that, you start making decisions from a point of fear. I guess the more you’re bold and fearless in what you’re doing, you have a better chance of making something really special — but that’s very easily said when you have all these corporate pressures. I guess you get to the point where you’ll try anything.”