User Reviews

No more than a sometimes funny Marvel parody. Too invested in making fun of superhero movies but at the expense of character development. Gets a little repetitive, and some moments are borderline cringe.

The showrunner for this series is Jon Brown, who was a writer on Succession and producer of Veep, both wonderful shows. His Executive Producers are Armando Iannucci (creator of Succession) and accomplished director Sam Mendes, who also directed the first episode. With these credentials, you'd expect this to be a hilarious behind the scenes satire of a franchise superhero movie. The big budget shows up in the elaborate studio setups and the cast has plenty of funny potential, including Himesh Patel, Aya Cash, Lolly Adefope and Richard E. Grant. Some others like Billy Magnussen and Daniel Brühl don't manage to make the humor work. Sadly, the script doesn't give them enough to work with. It needed more bite to land the lampoon. Sure, it's a smart look at the insane egos, constant adjustments and unrealistic studio demands of Hollywood moviemaking, but it creates more cringing than laughter. (Eight 30-minute eps)

Boring story, dull characters, zero sharp dialogue. Why did this self-indulgent mess even get made? Normally Ianucci is on the ball but this show says nothing fresh about the industry, unless it’s some kind of meta-commentary about itself.

I really enjoyed the pacing of this. May not be a laugh a minute but it has a clever script with great actors and some funny lines. Looking forward to seeing the rest of this.

Ironically, The Franchise fails in the same way as the films that it parodies - it just goes through the motions, delivering exactly what we expect. By the numbers, rote.