Veep creator making HBO satire about the “hellscape of franchise superhero movie-making”
By Dan Selcke
Armando Iannucci has been top dog in the satire game for years, skewering all things political in his shows The Thick of It and Veep, and skewering…something in the more recent Avenue 5. Now, Variety reports that he’s behind The Franchise, a new HBO satire that “follows a hopeful crew trapped inside the dysfunctional, nonsensical, joyous hellscape of franchise superhero movie-making.”
Sounds fun to me, although I wonder if we need a satire of the superhero-industrial complex when The Boys is already doing a pretty good job of it. Although The Boys is a superhero show that satirizes superhero shows while The Francshise will be directly about the business side of things.
This comes along at a time when I think people are starting to tire a bit of the superhero boom. The latest efforts from Marvel, including Doctor Strange 2 and Thor 4, haven’t been as universally celebrated as they used to be, and the glut of Marvel TV series is getting kind of ridiculous; we can’t go a month without a new one these days. Meanwhile, the newly formed Warner Bros. Discovery is cancelling $90 million superhero movies and promising it has a “10-year-plan” to fix the DC Extended Universe…but if Warner Bros. couldn’t make anything of it in the past 10 years, why should we expect the next 10 to be any better?
The Franchise will take Marvel and DC down a peg
In short, there’s a lot of material from a show like The Franchise to work with. It’s also kind of daring because HBO is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, so we can expect the show to take aim at its parent company. HBO actually has a history of doing this. After the recent Batgirl cancellation, John Oliver commented on Last Week Tonight that he has “the vague sense that you’re burning down my network for the insurance money.” And the excellent HBO show Barry had this gem of a scene taking aim at algorithm-driven streaming services:
You know who’s gonna love The Franchise whenever it comes out? Martin Scorsese:
Next. Martin Scorsese on Marvel movies: “That’s not cinema”. dark
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