Robert Downey Jr. Scarlett Johansson. Samuel L. Jackson. Don Cheadle. Kathryn Hahn. Tom Hiddleston. Angela Bassett. Elizabeth Olsen. Mark Ruffalo. Natalie Portman. Zoe Saldaña. Michael B. Jordan. Brie Larson. Stellan Skarsgård. Benedict Cumberbatch. Chadwick Boseman. Florence Pugh. Anthony Hopkins. Tilda Swinton. Cate Blanchett. Michelle Yeoh. This is an extremely incomplete list of great actors—icons, legends, cult heroes, Oscar and Emmy winners—who have inhabited characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Many of their performances in those titles were overseen by an impressive roster of established and emerging directors: Kenneth Branagh, Chloé Zhao, Ryan Coogler, Taika Waititi, Nia DaCosta. Yet, despite the occasional Black Panther-level triumph, the MCU has never come close to equaling the sum of its parts.
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The waste of talent, not to mention billions of studio dollars, on formulaic dreck is enough to frustrate all but the biggest superhero stans. That dark humor of squandered potential fuels HBO’s The Franchise, a comedy series, premiering Oct. 6, that follows the production of a particularly stupid film in a Marvel-like universe. The show’s executive producers, including Sam Mendes (who directed the pilot) and Veep creator Armando Iannucci, are A-list. The cast—Himesh Patel, Aya Cash, Richard E. Grant, Lolly Adefope, Billy Magnussen, and more—includes some of the funniest actors on Earth. So it’s ironic that, while it’s certainly no Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Franchise can, itself, feel like a missed opportunity.
Showrunner Jon Brown (Succession, Veep) sets an evocative scene. In a massive, drab studio complex, the cast and crew of Maximum Studios’ Tecto navigate the quotidian chaos of franchise filmmaking. Extras playing fish people and creatures made of moss wander the sound stage in their cumbersome costumes. A studio rep, worried that the movie’s lighting is too dark, is en route to intervene. The personalities we encounter are mostly familiar: Magnussen’s vain, insecure leading man, Adam; Grant’s louche, insecure thespian, Peter; Daniel Brühl’s eccentric, European, Christopher Nolan-worshiping director, Eric; Darren Goldstein’s fratty, art-agnostic suit, Pat. A few characters do feel genuinely fresh. Adefope is hilarious as Dag, a new hire who is blissfully ignorant of the hierarchy on set and feels free to point out compromises, hypocrisies, and other occupational hazards of franchise movies that everyone else politely ignores.
Brown chose the right protagonist, too, in Patel’s Daniel, the 1st assistant director, a notoriously stressful role tasked with solving every problem, from technical difficulties to auteurial temper tantrums, and keeping everyone, from stars to studio, happy. Or, as he puts it: “I’m Everything Man, the world’s most thankless superhero.” Competent and, in Patel’s hands, charming, Daniel keeps his problems with Tecto—and his own artistic ambitions—to himself, playing the patient straight man to an ensemble of whiny oddballs. “We don’t have an opinion,” he tells Dag. “We just keep the trains running.” (Later in the same episode, she asks: “Have you ever thought, am I killing cinema?”) But his ability to do so is challenged when the studio fires a producer who steadfastly protected the team and replaces him with Anita (Cash, perfectly cast), an ex-girlfriend and former peer of Daniel’s with whom he has a complicated professional past.
There’s plenty of potential for humor in this setup, yet I rarely found myself laughing out loud. The performances aren’t the problem. Neither is the dialogue. Brown’s experience working on some of TV’s most imaginatively profane shows is evident throughout the series. “The movie is a scrotum resting on a razor’s edge,” Daniel declares at one point. Eric has a great monologue in the premiere, melting down over the studio’s micromanagement of his idiosyncratic vision: “I look like this hipster, chinos man who goes to Muji to buy a towel, but I’m not. I’m strange. And I’m serious. I don’t know how to think like the kind of guy who washes his car, eats a chicken drumstick with his wife, and then has a bath. If that’s what they want, hire Ron Howard.”
But the narrative drags, in part because the stakes are so low. Would it be such a tragedy if Tecto, a film no one besides Eric actually seems to care about, got shelved mid-production by Maximum’s unseen but omnipotent Kevin Feige surrogate, Shane? If The Franchise is about the fundamental conflict between art and commerce, then it might have helped to give us a character or two whose creative potential we could take seriously. (Mythic Quest, the great Apple TV+ comedy series about a video game company, grounds its jokes in the frustrations of a socially stunted visionary programmer, Charlotte Nicdao’s Poppy Li.) Anita, the feminist-ish producer behind a Maximum show called The League of Exceptional Jessicas, drips sarcasm (“What else would I do with my master’s in English literature?”) but seems to have long ago surrendered her aspirations to a franchise that cynically hired her to solve its “woman problem.”
The Franchise also feels conspicuously late to the superhero-spoofing game. Under Feige’s leadership since 2007, Marvel Studios has been churning out movies like Tecto—and its better-funded, equally banal tentpole counterpart, Centurios 2—for as long as many of its biggest fans have been alive. (Lest we forget, HBO’s parent company owns its lesser yet still formidable rival, DC Studios.) The targets of Brown’s derision, from gimmicky visual effects to ridiculous product placement to the endless social media war between inclusivity influencers and fanboys who hate female superheroes, have been roundly mocked for years. While the series does make occasional attempts to situate itself within a blockbuster industry that is now in post-pandemic decline (Pat frets about getting “eaten in our sleep by 9-year-old TikTok kids with superhero fatigue”), a story more specific to this desperate stage of the MCU saga would have felt more timely.
Smartly scripted, amusingly acted, and believably realized, The Franchise is no failure. It’s never less than mildly entertaining—but rarely more, either. A handful of individual bits, from a subplot in which Adam becomes convinced his extreme wellness regimen is turning him into a sheep to a glitching LED volume that plays a several-story-high photo slideshow of a crew member trying on pants, offer glimpses of the funnier show it could have been. But great workplace satires, like Veep and Mythic Quest, excel at crafting characters and commentary as well as cracking jokes. With little substance underlying even the best punchlines, there’s a dearth of big laughs per episode and a yawning void (not this one) where the point should be.
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