The Franchise Series-Premiere Recap: The Toyman Cometh

Ah, yes, the Comic Book Movie Industrial Complex. An easy target for satire, to say the least: Comic-book movies have dominated the multiplex for over a decade and a half, and at the expense of a healthy film-going ecosystem — or so cinephiles will argue until they’re red in the face. I’m in my late 20s, and I can’t remember a time when the annual box office wasn’t clogged with Spider-, Super- or Bat-men. I’ve liked them well enough, especially the good ones. But to express a generally agreed truism like the coward I am, both the comic-book movie formula and their cultural ubiquity have become stale.

You’d forgive anyone who is similarly bored for laughing along with the low-hanging Schadenfreude of The Franchise, then — HBO’s new eight-part satirical comedy about the imperiled making of a comic-book film, Tecto: Eye of the Storm. It’s executive produced by Armando Iannucci, the master of satire behind The Thick of It, Veep, and The Death of Stalin, who also has a variety of story and writing credits per IMDb — with this first episode written by Jon Brown, who previously produced episodes of Veep and wrote for Succession and Peep Show.

Iannucci, Brown, with direction by Sam Mendes: It’s an Avengers-grade creative team. Even so, you do have to wonder whether there’s enough in dunking on superhero moviemaking to sustain an entire TV series. As with anything that is immensely popular and dominates the mainstream, it’s incredibly easy to rib Marvel and DC. It has been done plenty over the past decade and a half. Even the MCU has taken to self-deprecation, with that joke in Deadpool & Wolverine that the brand is “kind of at a low point.” And enjoyable as the first episode of The Franchise is, largely buoyed by its brilliantly committed ensemble, I didn’t laugh all that much … possibly three, four laughs? I exhaled out of my nose a few times. Maybe the jokes felt a little predictable, or familiar, or just too depressing. But where it wants for a little more humor and originality, there’s a lot of heart. It’s clearly made by people who really love the below-the-line, pull-up-your-sleeves folk who are the real heartbeat of these movies. (The real heroes! Sorry, sorry.)

One of whom is the production’s beleaguered first AD, Daniel, played by Himesh Patel without an off button, like a back-lot Howie Ratner. It’s from his perspective that we see much of this first episode, which takes place on day 34 of the Tecto shoot, as we’re told by an opening title card. The scene they’re prepping for? 31A: “Tecto Meets Eye,” and we kick off with a long take — very much Mendes’s schtick — with the camera following Daniel as he dashes between minor crises on set. All while running his new third AD, Dag (Lolly Adefope), through the fundamentals of the job, which includes smelling Gary, the boom guy, to see if he’s drunk or (merely!) high. Oh, and the heavy prosthetics worn by an extra — he’s playing a “fish man,” to be specific — give him a panic attack, for which Daniel offers a surefire remedy: a puff on his vape. It’s a propulsive sequence, establishing how fraught it is trying to get any movie made, let alone a comic-book movie that is pushing its budget and is always a moment away from catastrophe.

The fictional studio behind Tecto (Marvel in all but name, with a dash of DC to winkingly self-critical effect on the part of HBO parent company Warner Bros. Discovery) has drafted in a hotshot European auteur from the festival circuit, Eric Bouchard, following an award win at Locarno, played by the ever-brilliant Daniel Brühl, who brims with eccentricity. The insecure young buck who plays the titular lead, Adam (Billy Magnussen), is very much in his pocket; Richard E. Grant’s Waspy Peter, a curmudgeonly theater actor with a chip on his shoulder, is not. There’s a lot of fun to be had in watching the trio trade barbs throughout the episode, and how Adam and Peter respond to their director’s galaxy-brained prompts. (Directing the scene, Eric instructs Adam to walk … like this: “Swaggering but anxious. Like a panther on the way to a job interview.”)

The real spanner in the works is a surprise visit from the franchise’s head honcho, Pat “The Toy Man” Shannon (Ozark’s Darren Goldstein), who is an obvious parody of comic-book megaproducers like Kevin Feige. Why is he coming to the Tecto set? Well, the studio has their concerns, not least that the film — per Eric’s artsy vision — is too dark. “They know what I am,” he says, lamenting Pat’s arrival in his trailer, while his assistant, Steph (Spaced legend Jessica Hynes), reads the ending redraft notes he has written on his hand. “I’m a weird, difficult guy. 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,” he says. “If that’s what they want, hire Ron Howard.”

They return to set, where Adam and Peter bristle over their approach to the scene; the blue screen behind them is going to become a gushing waterfall in the post, so Adam is shouting over the imagined sound. Peter refuses. “I’ve got polyps on my vocal nodes. Brought on by TMT,” he says. “Too Much Theater.” It’s at this perfectly timed moment that Pat turns up and immediately gets to schmoozing Eric. But we know what producers are like — surely he’s softening him up for a blow? And, well, yep! In the craft services tent, Pat reveals that the entire Fishmen race is now to be massacred (RIP) in Centurios 2, the movie sequentially preceding Tecto.

Poor Eric is left to recalibrate his understanding of the universe — who, now, will carry the thematic luggage left by the genocided fish people! He demands the support of his producer, who cuts location scouting in Morocco short to talk Pat down and is promptly fired.

Replacing him is Anita (Aya Cash), with whom Daniel has a past of some sort and has been brought in by Maximum Studios after a successful stint producing the TV series The League of Exceptional Jessicas. (She recalls a review from this very website: “Vulture, I think it was, called it one of last month’s top seven promos dominating the cultural conversation.”) As if the shoot day couldn’t get any worse, Adam and Peter have been literally blinded — temporarily! Their eyes are merely sunburned — on set by the enormous spotlight brought in to satiate the studio’s demand for the film to be brighter. “Guys, the studio wanted more lighting because the culture demands a saturated aesthetic,” Eric says. “So, in a way, the culture blinded you.” It’s the funniest punch line of the episode, made funnier by Adam and Peter’s response, along the lines of, bro, get fucked.

After the chaos of the episode, it’s hard to conclude that the valiant artisans and managers working on these things — without any of the acknowledgment sponged up by the named stars — are anything but insane. That’s where Dag seems to fall after her first day on set, too, asking Daniel the best question of all: Why?

He tells her a joke about a guy called Curly who cleaned up elephant shit at the circus for 30 years — and at the end of each evening, he had to burn it all. “So, he goes home every night reeking of burnt elephant shit,” Daniel says. And yet, when he was offered a comfortably boring corporate job by his brother, Curly was baffled. “What, and quit show business?” They might clean up shit, but hey, at least they’re at the circus.

Post-Credits Scenes

• There are some actual post-credits scenes during the credits in which the stars of Tecto do publicity interviews. Another word for Richard E. Grant here, whose Peter hijacks his interview to bring up old anecdotes from his halcyon theaterdays. (And the time he played “the Chinaman” in an imaginary Eddie Murphy film.)

• Another delicious line read from Grant: “You really want to play ‘whose theater cock is bigger?’ Because I’m packing an absolute rager!”

• While the broader satire seems targeted more at Marvel — Maximum Studios is described as having a similarly tough time, relatively speaking, at the box office, and it is talked about as the dominant superhero-movie brand — Tecto itself gives big, bad DC-movie vibes.

• Darren Goldstein’s line reads are similarly great, such as this swaggering example of studio logic: “Centurios 2 is our tentpole. Without our tentpole, we don’t have a tent. And without a tent, we get eaten in our sleep by 9-year-old TikTok kids with superhero fatigue. Which is not a real illness and a scam.”

• Another figure looms large in the background, the enigmatic bigwig Shane, who is represented on set by his assistant, Bryson (Isaac Cole Powell). I think he’s supposed to be a Feige type, too, but I’m admittedly a little confused about how the hierarchy works in this fictional studio. Maybe he’s more of a David Zaslav — the cost-cutter at the top of the entire organization — and such is why everyone seems terrified of him. I might be being stupid, but I’m sure we’ll discover more as the series continues.

Related

• The Franchise Isn’t Super Satire, But It Is a Fun Hang