It feels like every big streaming service needs to have its own superhero property nowadays with Amazon having The Boys, and Disney+ having the whole Marvel Studios lineup. Though The Penguin is technically a comic book series, HBO has also greenlit another show that looks to take on the superhero genre in a different way.
The Franchise is set to premiere later in October, and while it looks like it’s poking fun at the making of superhero and big-budget films, it’s been revealed that a lot of the series is actually based on true stories.
The Franchise is Based on Reality
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, series creator Jon Brown (Succession) delved into how he and fellow co-creators Sam Mendes (1917) and Armanda Iannuci (The Death of Stalin) came up with the show. He explains:
“All the research we did — and we did tons, we spoke to so many people — the actual chaos [on superhero films] was really surprising,” says Brown. Then he gives some solid examples of some crazy scenarios that have actually happened during the making of these franchise projects. He continues:
“People think these movies are laid out in neat phases for the next 10 years. Then you hear about a set where, in the morning, a limo literally pulls up, the window comes down, and they hand out new script pages. Or producers on set have eight versions of the same script open, and they go through each script, cherry picking lines, and then they Frankenstein a scene out of nothing. Or the studio sends an actor to the set in the morning and they basically rewrite the day’s entire scene [to accommodate the last-minute cast addition]. You would assume all this was decided two years ago, but it’s happened a lot across Marvel and DC movies.”
Balanced on a Knife Edge
Though it does seem like Marvel is one big working movie machine, the current phase after Avengers: Endgame has seen the studio fumble a bit, trying to find out a direction and new characters that audiences can attach to. That doesn’t even compare to the chaos at DC, where there have been multiple changes demanded from creatives by studio heads and fans saw a change of direction with every property released starting with David Ayer’s Suicide Squad. Here's how the movie was originally marketed before it was re-edited to make it "fun":
Even Mendes shares some of his war stories while working on the James Bond film Spectre. “The reality of making [franchise] films is often absurd, chaotic, and decisions are made for the most random of reasons — you are balanced on a knife edge the whole time… There’s this sense of a massive engine moving forward relentlessly, and sometimes you feel like you are driving the train and sometimes you’re just a passenger as a director,” says Mendes.
How Real is The Franchise Going to be?
For legal reasons, it’s probably for the best that The Franchise is going to be about the making of a pretend big budget IP, but it should be an interesting watch for Marvel and DC fans to see just exactly what kind of chaos is happening behind the scenes when movies decide to add a last-minute action scene or suddenly have to replace an actor that was expected to be the villain for ten more movies.
Watch out for The Franchise when it hits Max on Oct. 6.