The Franchise Creator on Navigating the Superhero Genre’s “IP Minefield”

When the creators of HBO’s The Franchise first had the idea of parodying the behind-the-scenes chaos of an MCU-style operation, the superhero movie genre was soaring. Fresh from Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, Marvel’s Phase Three was coining it in, and every Comic-Con was a bonanza of new sequel and TV spinoff announcements. WandaVision and Loki were on their way, lesser-known comic book titles and characters were being mined for adaptation, and the superhero movie balloon just kept inflating.

And then the balloon… didn’t exactly burst, but did that thing balloons do a couple of weeks after a kid’s birthday by getting smaller, wrinklier, and sitting on the carpet as a melancholic reminder of the fun that was once had.

In the year between HBO’s The Franchise eventually shooting its 2022 pilot and being ordered to series in 2023, comic book movies didn’t have much good news to share. In November 2023, The Marvels had the worst ever box office opening of any MCU picture at that time. Warner Bros. released a trio of low-performing movies in Black Adam, Shazam! Fury of the Gods and The Flash. Disney’s Bob Iger started talking about shrinking the Marvel slate.

By the time the SAG-AFTRA strike had delayed production on The Franchise until early 2024, the comic book movie story was still evolving. Which is exactly what the HBO comedy had to do too.

“A big shift like that, it did feel like we needed to reflect the fact that it wasn’t 2020 where there were six TV shows over six months, and movies,” The Franchise showrunner Jon Brown told Den of Geek over Zoom. “That shift from the content goldrush of a couple of years back to it being announced ‘We’re not doing that anymore, we’re going to take our time’, was something that we were trying to reflect in the show.”

It was hard to keep up with the news cycle, Brown tells us, but that also meant there was no lack of ideas for a satirical comedy:

“The reality of these franchises, Marvel, DC, The Fast and the Furious, Star Wars, Indiana Jones…, whatever they are, they are changing gears a lot at the moment. They’re in a period of uncertainty. People are making moves and trying different things out by bringing an actor back, or there’s a public scandal and a movie has to be renamed or changed so there’s no shortage of inspiration. At a certain point, you have to put your pens down, you can’t get everything into one season.”

Reflecting real-life scandals, in however warped a comedy mirror, must have kept The Franchise’s legal team busy, Den of Geek suggests? Brown laughs. “That’s a good question, I don’t know. They don’t tell me! I’m assuming that there is someone, hopefully there is. Maybe there isn’t and we’re in real trouble? Maybe no-one’s been checking anything?”

Something that did keep the HBO comedy’s legal team busy was its use of fictional superhero characters. Trying to generate fake superhero names is harder than you might think, says Brown. “There are hundreds of thousands! When you go through the archives, Marvel and DC have so many, and anything you can think of has probably been done in one form or another and so there’ll be a copyright claim.

“We had a character called Multi Man and we just felt like that was so basic, a guy that there’s just lots of him and they were like, oh, you can’t call him Multi Man because there is a Multi Man. Well, can we call him Many Man? And they were like, you can call him Many Man. It would be this thing of going through these iterations.

“I think even our main hero, Tecto the earthquake guy, originally he was called Tecton like tectonic plates and then we were told we weren’t allowed to call him that. So, what if we take the ‘n’ off and call him Tecto? Okay, you’re allowed that. There’s obviously so much IP, there’s a big minefield of IP that you’re trying to dance through and find something that feels like a parody of those characters but that a) hasn’t been done before and that b) is as ridiculous as lots of them are. We spent a lot of time in the room talking about fake heroes, who they are, what their powers were, to try to get the details right. That was a challenge.”

The Franchise will be available on Sky and NOW from 21st October. The first three episodes will air on the 21st with new episodes released weekly.

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