The superhero sausage

A movie set belongs to a director. Hundreds of people come together to make a film, all of them trying to execute the director's vision.

- RAJA SEN

The buck stops with the director. It's their film, and they are meant to tell the story their way.

What, then, if we aren't talking about one film, but an entire interconnected "universe"—films that rely on one another to advertise fellow films, telling stories that don't end when the individual films do? Where does that leave an individual director? Robbed of vision, the director becomes another hired underling, servicing the almighty studio.

The Franchise (JioCinema) is a comedy series about the chaos on a Marvel-like film set. A set where the director is working on a need-to-know basis while orders come from a studio head far, far away. The staging of an intense emotional scene about death, for instance, is interrupted by new information—given on the day of the shoot—that product placement must be included in order to appease the Chinese market. This is a universe of constant compromise.

The Franchise was conceived by Sam Mendes—the great British filmmaker who made a couple of films for the James Bond franchise, the acclaimed Skyfall and the floundering Spectre, and he clearly has a thing or two to say about studio interference. He couldn't have chosen a more appropriate collaborator than master satirist Armando Iannucci who has always shown us that those in charge are, at best, only pretending to be in charge. His Veep and The Thick of It demonstrate the abject futility of politicians, while Avenue 5 shows that the captain of a spacecraft knows very little about where it's heading.