There is no greater humiliation inflicted on a grown man than being the director of a big-budget superhero franchise when the wheels are falling off. Not even working as a guy who had to wipe the butt of a medieval king. “Bridegroom on the Stool” is a credit that is sometimes more coveted than “Director.” And as even the most feared talent agent will tell you, I guarantee you that both will be terrible on the back end.
But you might think that’s confusing. Because shouldn’t a director be god level? That’s definitely what I thought when I started working as one of the writers on HBO’s new comedy The Franchise, which is set behind the scenes in the world of superhero movies. However, the more I talked to people inside the Marvel and DC comic book movie machines, and the more I talked to huge numbers of people, the more dysfunctional the picture that emerged became.
A director is fooled by a shot of a busy job opening a door while the second unit, along with the lead actors, is filming a key scene in another location that the studio actually planned to include in the movie. He talked about the moment he realized this. Other stars said they hire individual writers to punch up their characters’ lines and counteract everyone else’s lines. I heard that a limousine arrived on set, the windows were rolled down, and pages of the day’s new script were handed out. The masters and mistresses of the world, the directors, relived these humiliations with amazing zeal. Their films had become about them, not by them. They said the best survival strategy was to “go limp.”
And chaos! There have been many times in the writers’ room where we have said, “You know what? That’s too stupid. ” The idea of starting shooting a $300 million movie without a final third act seemed insane, but it was almost standard practice. The actors used amorphous green props during filming, which were later added to VFX. This is either because no one could agree on what the prop should be, or because tentative factions in the fandom threatened rebellion and murder over designs that slightly deviated from the comics. It turns out that the films that have become the dominant cultural products of our time were more chaotic behind the scenes than the proxy conflicts of the Cold War. And in many cases, the high mood wears off.
Additionally, in a perhaps not unrelated development, rifts were opening. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), once the most consistently profitable franchise in the history of Hollywood filmmaking, suddenly slumped and even suffered a flop or two. DC’s reboot allegedly came at a time when the studio was hearing about a potentially deadly new cultural pandemic: “Superhero Fatigue.”
But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Like many late superhero series movies, I started in the wrong place. So let’s spin this off to the original story…
Please picture the scene. You are the director of a superhero series of films. When the studio hired you with great fanfare, they gave you a budget to buy 100,000 wells across Somalia. That’s because you didn’t like to brag. But this was a really great way to remind myself how important my movie was going to be. Again, you loved movies more than anything, so what you did with your life was always important. You grew up admiring guys like Marty, Francis, and Quentin. Mr. Spielberg. At 17 years old, you accepted your shared destiny. At the age of 19, you decided to title your autobiography My Auteurbiography. 21 year old girls had sex with you to stop you from explaining Mulholland Drive for another hour. The next morning, all you had to say was, “I think you can see that structurally it’s a Möbius strip…” and they’d repeat it again.
You’re 26 years old, fresh out of graduate film school, and hoping to establish yourself as an uncompromising maverick, even filming a fragrance commercial. At 27 years old, you read the phrase “The Sundance to Spandex Pipeline,” a story about promising young indie directors being drawn into a superhero sausage factory, having first dates with models and winning awards. During a conversation at brunch, I ended up saying that as if it were about me. DJ recently made his own selection of raw antidepressants.
The 31-year-old produced Breakfast Cereal, a low-budget satirical slasher film about a diner chef who hunts down bad TripAdvisor reviewers. It was a hit at last year’s festival, and was also performed at Sundance, where you told the audience that critics had already called it “a slow-burning song, deliberately indigestible, like a human femur.” It was an understatement to call it “Funscape.” Barry Diller sent me peonies.
Action Station… Rory Adefope, Himesh Patel, Daniel Brühl, Jessica Hynes from The Franchise. Photo: HBO
You are also 31 years old and married to a model, officially making them a power couple. Well, is it a paper magazine? To you, they were all just noise and weren’t meant to disturb your work. Anyway, you bought a $2,000 chore jacket. We started calling watches “timepieces.”
Then, at 32 years old, a comic studio wanted you. They wanted you the way you always wanted them. Maybe your wife felt the same way. They wanted you to take your time and think about it, but obviously they wanted to announce your movie at Comic-Con next week. You told reporters that it was an honor to put a new spin on the story characters that defined your childhood. (Right? It didn’t matter. There was no way for anyone to check.) The studio loved your uncompromising vision, so they convinced you to make it darker and grittier. He said he knew he could do it. I should have known not to get caught in the machine.
Needle scratches. Cut to here. Now 36 years old, you’re sitting in your trailer an hour before dawn for a location shoot in a semi-democracy where a studio has sent you to take advantage of tax credits. You’re reading an article in The Hollywood Reporter about how Christopher Nolan has complete creative control in his new film about Nikolai Tesla, Current. Before that, I read an article in which Yorgos Lanthimos develops a very complex and disturbing story about power struggles within uncontacted tribes. you too? Your movie is about a man who grows very strong hair very quickly and can craft it into improvised weapons and life preservers. This was very isolating for him, some of whom killed his parents when he was a child.
The movie was supposed to take nine months to make, but it’s now been in the works for two and a half years. It is currently undergoing a second reshoot and has had more script revisions than Wikipedia. And there will probably be more writers. It’s bad enough that there’s no end, but now they’re rethinking the beginning. Thematically, it is both for and against the idea of war. I vaguely remember it once containing a message about climate. This shoot has generated 10,000 tons of CO2 (so far).
Ninety-seven days into filming, you developed nervous tics, a type of compulsive humming that often occurs in ruins. Or will it improve? It’s hard to tell. The crew liked you. Then they hated you. Then they took pity on you. Your wife is now living with Chris Pine. You want to quit, but if you do, the studio will quietly tell the entire industry that you’re in trouble. But today, the guards are going to let them choose a name for the Space Council that will later be cut from the movie. Isn’t that fun?
No, that seems like the obvious answer. Later, when you complete your smile for the premiere, you’ll see that there’s more they cut at the last moment. As for what they added…your movie was cuckooed. The vulnerable person’s (you) set was populated and taken over by studio forces who wanted to use it to further their own businesses. They’re loaded with last-minute product placements, random artifacts, and discontinuous scenes whose sole purpose is to set up and serve up characters and plotlines for other movies that are infinitely more important in this world. I sent it in. You realize that the movie you sold your soul to is some kind of indentured straight man. You created a $250 million content butler. Marketing will bring it to $400 million.
Studio producers have long said that successful directors in the age of franchise films are “directors who know what they don’t know.” I finally understood that this was a good way to express that my role was always more ceremonial than operational. Up until now you’ve only been a sports mascot in a foam suit or a regimental goat. For now, you accept your true place in this comic book world while hiding in a trailer. You are both the most important cultural unit ever and the least important cultural unit ever. You are the director of a superhero series.
Or… what about you? And that’s when the real twist hits you. That’s when you’ll know what’s really going on. Then you realize you’re M. Night Shyamalan. You suddenly realize that what you’re actually making is another horror. It’s a story about someone killing off your beloved movies in a truly grotesque way. So, who is that person? That can’t be true, right? But it’s possible. Well, that person is you! You killed the movie! It was you all along!
roll credit. And no, you can’t strip them of your name.
The franchise begins on October 21st on Sky Comedy and Now.
