How superhero franchise movies are losing their way: "It's a real mess"

A1 Digital India News: HBO's upcoming series The Franchise - a comedy about the behind-the-scenes struggles of making superhero movies - deals with a pretty absurd situation: A director working on a fictional Marvel-like film gradually discovers that studio executives have changed her direction of the creative on the project and that she has begun filming the "real" movie in secret elsewhere as she continues to film scenes that should have been deleted.

Yet, according to the show's producers, that's exactly the situation for at least one filmmaker working on the franchise film.

"From all the research we've done - and we've done a lot of research, we've talked to a lot of people - the real mess [in superhero movies] is really amazing," said franchise producer John Brown (Succession), who co-produced the film, written by Armando Iannucci (Veep) and co-produced with Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes (1917). "People think these movies will be made on the net stage for the next 10 years. Then you hear of a guy coming onto a set in the morning in a limousine, rolling down the window and writing a new script. Or the producers on set have eight versions of the same script, and they read each script, and then they create a scene from scratch. The studio sends an actor on stage in the morning and they basically rewrite the whole scene for the day [to cast the final hour], but you might think everything was decided two years ago. That happens a lot in Marvel and DC movies."

As a result, the writers of The Franchise sometimes find themselves in the awkward position of choosing storylines for their shows that are less wild than the real stories they've heard from industry insiders. "You think, 'I know this is true, but it sounds so crazy,'" Brown said. "So we have to take a step back sometimes, because you don't think people are on board with it." Until they found out it was true." The franchise began (its origin story, if you will) when Mendes and Iannucci had a lunch meeting in London. They exchanged ideas for collaborations and the two fell in. Then Mendes—who recently finished shooting the 2015 James Bond hit Spectre—begins to recount the "glorious chaos" he endured while directing two Bond films, with Mendes saying: "The reality of making a franchise film is often absurd, chaotic and decisions are made for the most random reasons—you're balancing on a knife's edge all the time." "There's a feeling of a huge engine constantly moving forward, and sometimes you feel like you're driving a train and sometimes just a passenger as the conductor."

As the two left the restaurant, Mendes recalled, "Armando turned and said, 'This is a show—the behind-the-scenes comedy of a franchise film.'

For Mendes, who directed the show's pilot, it was a chance for a serious film director to do something different. He said, "These are the shows I watch and I've always regretted that I never found the show I wanted to come home to watch at night."

The two soon realized that the ideal genre to satirize was not the spy franchise, but the superhero saga.

Once they chose Brown as showrunner, HBO greenlit the project. Casting proved surprisingly difficult, as the producers did not want certain roles to be played by actors they had previously done in comic book projects. Brown said, "It's very difficult to find actors who can be credible superheroes – with the physicality and the tone – who haven't done some piece of work [before]." "I remember reading about Wall Street and how it sucked up the best minds from MIT and Harvard, and then sat them at a terminal and made them trade endlessly. Something similar happened in Hollywood, where incredibly beautiful people are trapped in this machine that doesn't allow them to express their full potential and it's a lot of fun."

The result is a sharp and funny workplace comedy that follows the cast and crew of Tekto, a superhero show that can cause earthquakes. There's an insecure star (Billy Magnussen), a cocky British actor (Richard E. Grant), a frustrated visionary director (Daniel Brühl) and an ambitious newbie producer (Aya Cash). But the focal point of the show is the production's troubled first assistant director, Daniel (Himesh Patel), who does his best to keep everyone happy and satisfy his ego while guiding a troubled third assistant director (Lolly Adefope).