From superhero to super zero: Veep, Succession creators turn on Marvel

Given Armando Iannucci’s track record for skewering the pompous – his past works include the English political satires The Thick of it (for TV) and In the Loop (movie), the US political satire Veep, and the dark Soviet tragicomedy The Death of Stalin – you might imagine he comes at the world of superhero movie making as a fully fledged cynic. But you’d be wrong – or at least, not entirely right.

“I was a Marvel fan as a kid. I spent all my pocket money on Marvel comics, I had all the first editions and whatever, and then when I went to university my mum threw them all out because she just thought, ‘well, they’re comics, he won’t want those’,” he says in his delightfully gentle Scottish brogue.

Somewhere along the line he let this shady aspect of his past slip, and Marvel Comics got in touch with the offer to write for them. “So I’ve done a Spider-Man, I’ve done a Daredevil,” he says. “And when the films started coming out, I was a big fan. I loved the first Iron Man. Captain America: Winter Soldier is a great standalone espionage film. Thor: Ragnarok, there’s a great comic element.

“The ones that have a distinctive style and voice of their own are the standouts. It’s when they started to feel like they were just part of a bigger monster, that you won’t be able to understand this film unless you’ve seen these three streaming TV shows, that’s when I felt this is out of control.”

And that’s when he and Sam Mendes – director of the James Bond movies Skyfall and Spectre, and an Oscar winner for American Beauty – began kicking around the idea of what would become The Franchise, a TV comedy-drama set on the making of just such a bloated concoction.

Richard E. Grant has a ball as a jaded and rather hammy actor who struggles to take any of it very seriously.Credit: Binge/Foxtel

“When I grew up wanting to make movies the model was Citizen Kane or Casablanca or Lawrence of Arabia,” says Mendes. “These are movies that had a beginning, a middle and an end. And the model that’s emerged in the franchise world in the last 20 years is movies that have a beginning, a middle, and then another beginning – a movie that never ends, that sprouts off in all directions, that endlessly develops and evolves down blind alleys and weird tributaries, TV series, spin-offs and all the rest. And that’s what this really is about.”

The eight-episode series is very much cut from the same cloth as Veep et al. Set midway through the production of a superhero movie that is rapidly getting away from its director (Daniel Brühl) amid the alternating micromanaging and disinterest of its studio-appointed producers, it clearly knows the world it skewers, and is at least a little in love with it.

The idea was born one day over lunch four or five years ago, as Mendes shared with his friend Iannucci some of the frustrations of working on Bond movies.

“As a director, you’re used to being the instigator, the creative driver, and with a franchise, you have to accept there are people there who know the story and the world better than you do, and that’s a very odd experience,” says Mendes. “There’s a sort of naive dream when you start movies where you have the resources and the money and the big train set that somehow things are finally going to be easier [than on a smaller-budget production]. And in fact, they’re much more difficult because there’s more pressure and there’s more at stake.”

At the time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe seemed utterly indomitable. But by the time they had a show ready to make, some of the air had gone out of the tyres. “So it felt like the right time to draw on this sense of a very confident studio going through a bit of an existential crisis,” says Iannucci. “Which is a potentially funny thing to watch.”

The pair had too many other projects on the boil to properly shape the show, so Iannucci enlisted writer Jon Brown to take it from loose idea to fully fledged series.

“He worked on all seasons of Succession, he worked with me on Veep and Avenue 5, and we’ve spent the last couple of years writing a screenplay for a movie that I’m doing next year,” says Iannucci. “So I knew Jon really well, I put the idea to him, he loved it, and he’s also a fan of the movies, and he met Sam and they got on really well. It meant we had someone who was going to make it their own thing, but shared our passion about it, our take on the comedy and the drama of it.”

For Brown, it was crucial that the show didn’t come from a place of disdain for the world of superhero movies. “I didn’t want it to just say ‘franchise movies are bad and they’re killing cinema’,” he says.

There’s no denying the dominance this particular cultural product has enjoyed for the past couple of decades, but it’s wrong to simply blame the studios for it, he argues. “My feeling is we’re all culpable. If we didn’t indulge in these things, if we didn’t watch all this stuff, all these TV shows we think are terrible but secretly watch anyway, if we stopped watching, the culture would change and things would be different, and we would be served different things.

‘I feel it’s potentially a sort of therapy for people.’

Showrunner Jon Brown

“I wanted to look at that. It’s quite a big topic, and it’s something we look at in individual episodes. What are the commercial forces that lead to product placement, or is there a culture war that means you’ve got to deal with ‘the woman problem’? There’s lots of elements that make these movies the things they are, and I guess I was just interested in looking at that through a comic lens.”

(From left) Richard E. Grant as Peter; Himesh Patel as first assistant director Daniel; Daniel Brühl as the director Eric; and Billy Magnussen as leading man Adam; and Jessica Hynes as director’s assistant Steph.Credit: Binge/Foxtel

Equally important, though, was that the comedy be grounded in reality. To that end, says Brown, “I did a ton of research, and spoke to a lot of people”.

As with Veep and Succession, once people in the target industry got wind of the project, they were queuing up to share their stories. “It’s amazing how forthcoming they were, people inside Marvel and DC and other franchises too, people who are still active on those projects,” says Brown. “We’ve got a load of research that we haven’t even used yet, for future seasons.

“For a lot of people it’s such a peculiar experience they go through, so much of their life gets absorbed in making it, they put so much of themselves into it. Sometimes the job loves you back, and sometimes it doesn’t. So I feel it’s potentially a sort of therapy for people. They’re really keen to see their experience reflected back in a way that feels real and truthful.”

Mendes insists it’s not all grim, though. Sure, it can sometimes feel like you’re “working in a sausage factory”, he says, but “no one starts a movie thinking they’re going to make a bad film. Everyone starts it thinking and hoping they’re going to be involved in the making of a masterpiece.

“There’s a naivety and beauty in that, which Jon manages to capture, so that it doesn’t feel cynical, it doesn’t feel like you’re just shooting at easy targets.

“The people actually making the movie, the people who are right at the centre of it, really care,” Mendes adds. “That’s what’s so lovely about it, what gives it its heart, and what makes it more than just satire for me.”

The Franchise is on Binge and Foxtel

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.