Before superhero movies, directors were masters of the universe – now you can find them cowering in their trailers

When I started looking at how the superhero movie sausage gets made for a new HBO comedy, I found a world of dysfunction, missed deadlines and utterly frazzled film-makers

W hen the wheels are coming off, there is no more exquisite humiliation that can be visited upon an adult human than being the director of a big-budget superhero franchise movie. Not even working as the guy who had to wipe a medieval king’s arse. “Groom of the Stool” is sometimes a more covetable credit than “Directed by”. And as even the most fearsome talent agent will tell you, both guarantee you get shit on the back end.

But that’s confusing, you might think, because aren’t directors supposed to be god tier? That’s definitely what I thought, back when I started as one of the writers on The Franchise, a new HBO comedy set behind the scenes in the world of superhero movies. Except the more we talked to people inside the comic-book movie machines of Marvel and DC – and we talked to huge numbers of people – the more dysfunctional the picture that emerged became.

A director told us about the moment they realised they were being fobbed off with busywork shots of a door being opened, while a second unit was somewhere else with the lead actors, filming the big scenes the studio were actually going to put in the movie. Another told us about individual stars hiring individual writers to punch up their characters’ lines – and punch down everyone else’s. We heard about limos pulling up on set, the window going down, and new script pages for that day being passed out. Directors, those masters and mistresses of the universe, were surprisingly keen to relive these indignities. Their movies had become something that was done to them, not by them. They talked about the best survival strategy being to “go limp”.

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