THE FRANCHISE Takes a Funny Behind-The-Scenes Peek at Why Many Superhero or Comic Book Movies Turn Out The Way They Do

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede Making a movie is always full of challenges, but making a movie that’s part of an existing superhero or comic book franchise presents its own unique set of circumstances. Thus, the new HBO series THE FRANCHISE, which debuts Sunday, Oct. 6 on Crave, has comedy aspirations and targets that are very specific to the modern entertainment world. This is a TV show for anyone who has ever seen an underwhelming franchise movie and wondered, “how could they wind up with something like this?” Executive produced by OSCAR® winner Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Skyfall, 1917), EMMY® winner Armando Iannucci (HBO’s VEEP, available on Crave), and Jon Brown (also credited as the creator), THE FRANCHISE follows the crew of a franchise movie as they fight for their place in a cinematic universe that seems intent on chewing them up and spitting them out. “It’s a world that’s ripe for satire, and these franchises are very huge, right?” Brown said in a panel interview with the cast and producers. “They’re enormous productions, and they can take themselves very seriously. But I didn’t want to make a show that just says, ‘these movies are bad.’ That’s not interesting. It’s like, why? Why are they the way they are? What are the forces at play that make them this way? That felt really important, but I was also really keen that the show had real human warmth to it, that it wasn’t a kind of cold, hard satire. It’s really about people and their experiences of being stuck in this machine.” Furthering that point, unlike a lot of workplace comedies, THE FRANCHISE is not about incompetent people. Most of the characters – played by the likes of Himesh Patel, Aya Cash, Jessica Hynes, Lolly Adefope, Billy Magnussen, Richard E. Grant, and Daniel Brühl – are actually quite good at their jobs. “The tragedy is, these are the only movies you can make now, so they’re trapped,” Brown said. “It’s the system that’s dysfunctional, not the individual.” Mendes has witnessed many of these industry changes first-hand, through his own vast history as a filmmaker. “When I grew up making movies, there was a model,” Mendes said. “The perfect model of a movie was a movie with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I grew up wanting to make Citizen Kane, or Casablanca, or Lawrence of Arabia. And now the model of a movie is a movie with a beginning, a middle, and another beginning, because they don’t ever end. There’s a constantly flowing stream, tributaries, spinoffs, TV shows, all interconnected in a multiverse.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing, according to Mendes. As he acknowledged, if it weren’t for franchise movies, the theatres would be empty. And it is possible to make great franchise movies – he pointed to 2008’s The Dark Knight (starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger, and available on Crave) as one of his examples. “But the problem is that people are spitting these things out too fast, and thoughtlessly,” he said. “Sometimes they’re just a title and a logo, and then everyone has to sort of reverse-engineer the movie to match the title. Elements of that are talked about in this show.” Almost all the characters in THE FRANCHISE are suffering from paranoia, for many different reasons. But there’s an old saying that goes, if others really are out to get you, then paranoia is just good thinking. “There’s something very interesting happening to directors, specifically in franchise movies where they’re often being marginalized – they’re very rarely fired, but yet they sometimes aren’t making the movie they think they are,” Brown observed. “They’re being slowly sidelined out of the way, and the movie’s happening over here, or there’s an edit that they’re in control of, but there’s a secret edit where they’re really cutting the movie. We’ve heard a lot of those stories. They like to bring in a director with a profile, but they also don’t really want the director to make the movie, because they’ve got a bigger story to tell.” Iannucci wanted to be clear about one point, however. “There are so many dramas and some comedies about the plight of the director, and Sam was always very clear, this is about the people on the stage floor who make the thing work,” Iannucci said. “It was always going to be about those people, who have skills and craft and ambition and talent, spending all their energy on something, and at the end of the day still thinking, is it worth it? What are we doing? And that, for me, was fun. Being at the centre of a big machine is a funny thing, because it goes back to that whole status thing of, am I in charge?” That simple question – “am I in charge?” – forms the comedic backbone of THE FRANCHISE. And the answer is usually, “yes when you shouldn’t be, and no when you should be.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv