Summary
Big-budget franchise filmmaking might seem a too-easy target for satire, but The Franchise’s premiere proves itself worthwhile with needlessly dynamic formal flourish and genuinely funny jokes.
There’s a joke at the end of The Franchise’s premiere that sums the whole thing up. In it, Himesh Patel’s Daniel, the first AD of an in-production tentpole superhero movie, tells Lolly Adefope’s newly-minted third AD, Dag, about a man named Curly who works in the circus. He followed the elephants around, collected their excrement, and at the end of the night had to burn it. He’d go home smelling of torched feces every night. But, when he was offered a comfortable office job by his brother with regular hours and decent pay and no elephants in sight, he responded, laughingly, “What, and quit showbusiness?”
That’s it. That’s the point of HBO’s eight-part satire of tentpole superhero moviemaking, produced by Armando Iannucci (known mainly for Veep, but late of Avenue 5, which also briefly featured Patel), written by Succession and Peep Show scribe Jon Brown, and directed, somewhat improbably, by Sam Mendes. It’s about the circus. Everyone’s happy to be a clown.
Episode 1 of The Franchise, “Scene 31A: Tecto Meets Eye” – a titling practice that suggests each outing will revolve around a single scene of the inevitably doomed comic-book blockbuster Tecto: Eye of the Storm – arrives both late and right on time. The Comic Book Movie™ zeitgeist is, in a way, over. Superhero fatigue – which is described at one point here as “not a real illness” – has set in. The formula has never been an easier target for satire.
You have to wonder, then, why this all-star tag team of creative talent would bother making fun of it. It seems beneath them and beneath a perplexingly committed ensemble. And yet there’s nothing half-arsed about this premiere; it’s funny, frantic, dynamic, and contains at least a handful of legitimate laughs in just 30 minutes. I might not entirely see the point, but I’m always here for grade-A craftsmanship.
For instance, “Scene 31A: Tecto Meets Eye” opens with a needlessly good one-take tracking shot like Mendes is still directing 1917, following Daniel as he spins the plates of multiple on-set crises – including, but not limited to, a high boom mic operator and an extra having a panic attack in a latex fishman suit – without breaking stride. It’s a wonderful sequence, dense with jokes and about a hundred implied subplots and eccentric characters. It seems almost too good for whatever this show intends to really be about.
The Franchise | Image via HBO
And what is that? Who is it really sending up? Tecto seems like one of those (largely terrible) quasi-Shakespearean DC movies, but the dialogue implies the studio is industry-dominating like Marvel. Warner Bros. Discovery – look out for the logo! – owns HBO, so one has to imagine the criticism in that direction won’t be too barbed. It makes fun of auteur European directors with Eric (Daniel Brühl), an eccentric German who has been brought in from the festival circuit to lend Tecto a bit of buzz and at one point tells the movie’s lead, Adam (Billy Magnussen), to walk like a panther on its way to a job interview. It even ridicules the hoity-toity theatre actors who are sometimes lured to these kinds of projects, with Richard E. Grant’s scene-stealing Peter being The Franchise’s clear stand-out in Episode 1.
But the show’s real ire is reserved for figures like Pat Shannon (Darren Goldstein), a Kevin Feige-like super-producer who is in charge of the Tecto franchise and arrives on set to throw the production even further into disarray, blithely informing Eric that the fishmen extras he’s so fond of will all be massacred in Centurios 2, an unreleased movie in the same universe that will nonetheless precede Tecto chronologically. So, Eric has to somehow work the fallout of aquatic genocide in.
If these are the bad guys, who are the good guys? Daniel’s Curly joke at the end of the episode implies he’s just happy to be there, but people like him and Dag and the latex-clad extras and the guys who run the craft services are the unsung heroes of big-budget moviemaking, which doesn’t go unacknowledged. If there’s a point to that one-take opening other than working as a Mendes calling card, it’s to highlight that Daniel is bearing the weight of the entire production on his shoulders.
With this in mind, you can kind of see the point. Towards the end of The Franchise Episode 1, Adam and Peter are both temporarily blinded by an enormous spotlight brought in to satisfy the culture’s demand for a saturated aesthetic, and that just about sums things up. The sacrifices made on the altar of mainstream entertainment come down from on high, and ultimately, even if the “stars” might take the brunt to some extent, it’s the dogsbodies who are left to follow along behind them, catching whatever mess they leave behind.
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