‘The Franchise’ Is a Superhero-Movie Satire Too Snooty for Its Own Good

HBO’s new comedy series The Franchise is about the making of Tecto: Eye of the Storm, a superhero movie for a barely-disguised version of Marvel Studios. In short order, it becomes clear that the only person in the cast and crew who actually cares at all about the movie’s subject matter — Tecto, a superhero who can make earthquakes with the help of an invisible jackhammer — is first assistant director Daniel (Himesh Patel), who grew up reading the source material. Daniel’s new assistant Dag (Lolly Adefope) is just trying to get a producer credit as quickly as she can after starting her career late. Pretentious director Eric (Daniel Brühl) sees it as a way to cement his friendship with Christopher Nolan (who he refers to as “Chris”). Leading man Adam (Billy Magnussen) is trying to get into fashion and other career opportunities. Classically-trained actor Peter (Richard E. Grant) is just in it for the paycheck. And new producer Anita (Aya Cash) sees taking over the troubled project as a way to cash out and make, as she puts it bluntly, “actual movies, not this franchise bullshit.”

Superhero movies in general, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular, are ripe for lampooning in this moment. At one point, Daniel tells Anita, “The studio has lost its way. These movies are not hitting the way they used to.” He might as well be describing the entire post-Endgame era of the MCU, which has had a few hits, but mostly seems to inspire either mockery, or surprise that there continue to be new films and shows. Even the recent announcement that Robert Downey Jr. would be returning to the films, now playing Dr. Doom instead of Iron Man, seemed to strike many fans as more sad than exciting.

Yet this abrupt fall from pop-culture necessity to afterthought makes the superhero industrial complex almost too easy to spoof. At one point, Daniel accuses Anita of thinking she’s better than this ridiculous film she’s producing. It’s a bit of The Franchise telling on itself, as the show frequently comes across as believing it’s so superior to its subject that it doesn’t even have to try hard to successfully mock it. Thanks to the sheer talent of the cast, and to the kind of creative profanity you get from any comedy produced by Veep creator Armando Iannucci, there are laughs to be had — just not nearly enough given the pedigree. And most of the satire seems content to skim the surface of superhero movie culture.
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Though Iannucci is producing and Oscar winner Sam Mendes (American Beauty) is directing, the creator is Jon Brown, who has previously written for Veep, Succession, and Iannucci’s disappointing Veep follow-up, the sci-fi sitcom Avenue 5. Here, we pick up many years into the once-dominant run of Maximum Studios, which has its own Kevin Feige figure in Shane, an all-powerful studio boss who is so overextended that he never comes to set, and instead communicates via Bryson (Isaac Powell), the kind of eager young bootlicker who uses “action” as a verb. Everyone associated with Tecto can tell that Shane and aggressive-bro exec Pat (Darren Goldstein) have no real faith in their film, and just need some product to get into theaters in between Maximum’s bigger tentpoles. Daniel is terrified that Pat will find out about all their cost overruns, including an amount of money wasted on importing Japanese trees — for a scene that was later cut from the film — so staggering, it would have been enough to build a children’s hospital. (“But what price, dreams?” Dag wryly responds.)

The Franchise is at its strongest in conveying the sheer sense of chaos that comes from such a huge and cynical production. One of the show’s more amusing punchlines is also among its first, as we watch Daniel lead Dag across the set for the first time, deftly anticipating and preventing each crisis right before it happens. Toward the end of their walk together, he approaches Peter and asks Dag to pull him away within six seconds, which turns out to be the exact interval needed to spare him from hearing Peter tell an offensive joke about trans people(*).
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(*) Peter’s checkered past of playing roles that would get him canceled today is among the more effective running gags — particularly during the fake interview clips that play over each episode’s closing credits.

It’s a funny joke, but also one not specific to superhero films — or, really, films at all. (In that particular context, Peter could just as easily be some aging corporate vice president who refuses to retire.) Ditto the ongoing Iannucci family’s skill with combining obscenities in novel ways, like a scene where Eric’s colleague Steph (Jessica Hynes) encourages him to curse before returning to set, and he unleashes a stream of words and phrases like “shitwit,” “cocktangle money fascist,” “fuck clump cosmic anus,” and “granny fucker.” 

The comedy about the silly things that are unique to this genre is much more hit and miss. There’s a lot of humor built around Adam, Peter, and their beleaguered female co-star Quinn (Katherine Waterston) having to do most of their work on cheap-looking sets and/or green screen, with most of the movie being constructed later via computer. (There also, for some reason, appears to be only one person doing the CGI for movie.) Quinn has to deal with the built-in misogyny of both the fan base and the system that makes the movies — “I’ve only done a sexism once, in a beer commercial,” Eric recalls, “but I’ve always wanted to do a feminism” — while Adam feels pressured to inject himself with various illicit substances to maintain a Tecto-sized physique. (Instead, he fears that “I Dorito’ed myself: bigger on top, tapering down to a skinny leg.”) Long stretches go by with more sweat than mirth, and it often seems as if Brown and the other writers assume the audience will have as much contempt for this stuff as they do. But simply identifying a problem with these movies, and what they’ve done to cinema in general, does not have the same impact as crafting an interesting joke about it.

It also feels more than a little hollow for this particular show to be part of the vast Warner Bros. Discovery empire, which has not only produced plenty of allegedly cinema-wrecking superhero films of its own, but is currently making a superhero-adjacent show that will debut each episode on the same night and network as The Franchise.

Still, there’s that cast. It’s all but impossible these days to put together an ensemble where someone doesn’t have a superhero credit in their past, and this one of course has several. As Helmut Zemo, Daniel Brühl has been in one of the best MCU projects (Captain America: Civil War), and one of its absolute worst (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier). Richard E. Grant played Classic Loki in a few Loki Season One episodes, and Aya Cash was the villainous Stormfront on The Boys — a show whose have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach to superhero parody has cast a long shadow over everything else that’s approached this terrain. Cash feels underutilized — she, Patel, and Adefope all to some degree end up playing straight man to the weirdos around them — but Brühl, Grant, Magnussen are all having an infectious amount of fun in what would easily seem like two-dimensional roles with less gifted and invested actors playing them.
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But just as almost everyone involved in making Tecto wishes they were applying their abilities to a more worthy project, I came out of The Franchise lamenting the fact that such a great collection of actors and producers were involved in a show that’s not nearly as funny as it should be. 

The first episode of The Franchise premieres Oct. 6 on HBO and Max, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all eight episodes.