One Major Franchise Filmed Two Versions of a Movie at Once Without Telling Director

Things in Hollywood are wild, and studio intervention is rampant, even on massive franchises that we all assume are planned out and organized. In fact, according to The Franchise creator Jon Brown (Succession), one studio filmed two versions of one movie without informing the director.

That’s a situation that takes place in The Franchise, which Brown created alongside Armando Iannucci (Veep) and James Bond director Sam Mendes. It sounds like an entirely made-up story that would never happen to a movie franchise, but it is just one of the wild things that they discovered did happen when doing research for the series that focuses on a group of filmmakers trying to make a franchise superhero movie.

“All the research we did — and we did tons, we spoke to so many people — the actual chaos [on superhero films] was really surprising,” Brown said. “People think these movies are laid out in neat phases for the next 10 years. Then you hear about a set where, in the morning, a limo literally pulls up, the window comes down, and they hand out new script pages. Or producers on set have eight versions of the same script open, and they go through each script, cherry-picking lines, and then they Frankenstein a scene out of nothing. Or the studio sends an actor to the set in the morning and they basically rewrite the day’s entire scene [to accommodate the last-minute cast addition]. You would assume all this was decided two years ago, but it’s happened a lot across Marvel and DC movies.”

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That is a bunch of absolutely bonkers stuff, and the trio of creators goes on to discuss how having a single figure like Kevin Feige at the head of Marvel can lead to situations like this, even noting that the show came around from a discussion of the madness Mendes went through filming two James Bond movies. They do not, of course, give any specific details about which film or franchise suffered from an entirely separate movie being made at the same time as the original film was shot, but for those who follow the industry, some assumptions can be made.

For those, however, looking for a takedown of Feige himself as the godlike figure of Marvel in The Franchise, it’s probably not going to happen.

“Everyone we spoke to said, ‘Kevin Feige is an incredibly nice man,'” Brown said. “So straight away as a writer, you’re like, ‘F**k, that’s such a shame — be a real monster and we could go after him.'”