Superhero movie satire ‘The Franchise’ takes aim at Marvel Studios

What, then, if we aren’t talking about one film, but an entire interconnected “universe"—films that rely on one another to advertise fellow films, telling stories that don’t end when the individual films do? Where does that leave an individual director? Robbed of vision, the director becomes another hired underling, servicing the almighty studio.

Also read: Chef Garima Arora on winning two Michelin stars

The Franchise (JioCinema) is a comedy series about the chaos on a Marvel-like film set. A set where the director is working on a need-to-know basis while orders come from a studio head far, far away. The staging of an intense emotional scene about death, for instance, is interrupted by new information —given on the day of the shoot—that product placement must be included in order to appease the Chinese market. This is a universe of constant compromise.

The Franchise was conceived by Sam Mendes—the great British filmmaker who made a couple of films for the James Bond franchise, the acclaimed Skyfall and the floundering Spectre, and he clearly has a thing or two to say about studio interference. He couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate collaborator than master satirist Armando Iannucci who has always shown us that those in charge are, at best, only pretending to be in charge. His Veep and The Thick of It demonstrate the abject futility of politicians, while Avenue 5 shows that the captain of a spacecraft knows very little about where it’s heading.

With Veep producer Jon Brown as showrunner, and a smashing ensemble cast—many of whom have indeed appeared in superhero movies and shows —The Franchise shows how the superhero movie sausage is made.

Just as the studio within the series, rallying against Martin Scorsese and superhero fatigue, feels like a barely disguised version of Marvel, this satire too feels—alarmingly—plausible. With Marvel now infamous for pushing VFX operators to abusive extremes, the comparison seems exact.

The show takes us to the set of the film “Tecto: Eye of the Storm". As a less glamorous stepchild within a sprawling fictional universe, “Tecto" suffers from constant chaos, budgetary constraints and forced improvisation.

A producer looks around at the sloppy work being performed and says it is “not exactly Bergman". This immediately confuses a more senior producer who is having trouble keeping his superheroes straight: “Berg Man? Which one’s Berg Man? The iceberg guy?"

The one making this film happen is Daniel Kumar (Himesh Patel), the first assistant director who—by dint of all the juggling—knows where the bodies are buried and how best to bury them. He has to keep up with warring actors Peter (Richard E. Grant) and Eric (Billy Magnussen), with former lover Anita (Aya Cash) who is producing this film, the film-illiterate studio boss Pat (Darren Goldstein) and, of course, director of “Tecto" Eric Bouchard (Daniel Brühl), an ambitious and pretentious artist who keeps wondering out loud how Werner Herzog would have shot a superhero movie.

As with Marvel movies back when they used to be fun, the writing is the star. Richard E. Grant’s pompous veteran actor, is scornful about a day where he has no lines but will keep having to nod and react to fellow actors: “Nod away, and let those clever little boys in India paint around me with their graphics." We’re informed that big name writers—David Mamet, Aaron Sorkin—carry out last-minute script changes for these big silly films, but always uncredited, of course. The “Tecto" set, where the studio sends characters that aren’t needed elsewhere, is referred to as a “refugee camp for displaced intellectual property" and yet Anita the producer suggests that “let’s pre-vis our happy faces".

Brühl, as the frequently nervous filmmaker desperate to impress Christopher Nolan, is the standout performer, grappling every day with the pointlessness of the process. He keeps trying to take a creative stand but realises that it changes nothing. “I feel like every time I find a hill to die on," he says, bitterly, “I die on it, and then I’m just dead on a hill."

He’s being soothed—and battled—by Himesh Patel’s hapless Daniel Kumar, the AD who actually gives a damn about “Tecto", having grown up on the comic books. Kumar, the man carrying around the “god mic", the microphone that is heard by everyone on set, offloads the cruelty he faces by being cruel to (who else but) the VFX operator. Like all capable assistants, he does hope one day to direct, and in his head he’s thought of a way to take the “Tecto" story forward creatively. Some call this “the Kumar cut".

“What is happening, Daniel?," asks Eric. “No idea," says an exhausted Daniel, “I’m just panicking in real time like you."

The worry is that The Franchise may have arrived a touch too late. A character mentions “9-year-old TikTok kids with superhero fatigue" but the truth is that most of us share that affliction by now. It’s hard to satirise something that the audience doesn’t really care about anymore, and that other Aya Cash project The Boys (Amazon Prime Video) got there first. The unwieldy superhero movie universe may already be a relic of the past, which makes this feel both too specific and too harmless. Martin Scorsese won this round already.

Raja Sen is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series. He posts @rajasen

Also read: Air pollution is a national problem. Can you live with it?