10 superhero movie stories stupider than anything in The Franchise

HBO’s comedy sends up the absurdity of blockbuster comic book flicks – but it’s got nothing on the behind-the-scenes chaos of these films

Egotistical actors, meddling executives, extras suffering panic attacks from beneath their prosthetic make-up – the new Sam Mendes-Armando Iannucci-produced comedy The Franchise is a fictional series inspired by real-life drama behind the scenes of superhero movies. 
Perhaps the biggest name in the cast is Richard E Grant, who plays a stage grandee reduced to donning a wizard’s outfit to portray the villain in a Marvel-style caped caper – a ritual of degradation suffered through clenched teeth. 
Grant has some superhero form, having acted opposite Hugh Jackman in gritty Wolverine spin-off Logan. He certainly has his fun with The Franchise, where the comic book folly in which he is starring gets the tough-love treatment from a ruthless studio boss loosely based on Marvel mastermind Kevin Feige (apparently, the real Feige is much more polite and humane). 
Overall, the vibe is one of barely-contained chaos – a reflection, says showrunner Jon Brown, of the off-camera reality of the superhero industry.
“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,” Brown explained. “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.” 
The Franchise is watchable, though tremendously sneery of nerd culture – you can tell everyone involved is delighted superhero movies are on their uppers and that the day of geek in popular culture is at an end. But setting to one side such unfortunate snobbery, its portrayal of Hollywood anarchy is right on the money – as the following countdown of real-life superhero movie disasters confirms. 
Richard Donner had persuaded the notoriously tardy and truculent Brando to play Superman’s patrician dad, Jor-El, with the promise of a $3.7 million salary and a share of the box office. Brando intended to use the earnings to fund a documentary about discrimination against Native Americans – not that such noble ambitions helped his attitude as the cameras rolled. 
Clearly regarding himself as too good for the material – his performance was obviously an influence on Richard E Grant in The Franchise –  he huffed and puffed through his 13 days on set (adding up to 20 minutes screen time). That his fellow cast and crew were in for a difficult time was made apparent at the outset, when Brando announced he would play Jor-El “like a bagel” – whatever that meant (nobody ever quite figured it out). 
Too lazy to learn his lines, he had crew members hold them up to him on cardstock while Donner was reduced to “luring” Brando out of his trailer with food. Brando “had no incentive to be on time, because his agent had struck the most amazing deal for him,” said actor Cary Elwes, who worked on Superman as an intern. “Every day that the picture went over, he got another million dollars.”
He didn’t endear himself to Donner or Superman actor Christopher Reeve, who was frank about the challenge of working opposite a cinema icon. “I must say – I don’t say this to be vicious – but I don’t worship at the altar of Marlon Brando because I feel that he’s copped out in a certain way,” Reeve told chat show host David Letterman. “He doesn’t care anymore. And I just think it’d be sad to be [his age] and not give a damn.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr Freeze is remembered for his atrocious puns – “allow me to break the ice” etc – but his participation in the film was left in suspended animation when the character’s “Freeze gun” vanished from the set. It was tracked down to the home of a memorabilia collector in Hollywood, who claimed it had been passed to him by a contact under false pretences. 
“That’s how they ended up coming with a search warrant to my house, and that’s when the whole nightmare started. This guy’s saying I’m the big fish.” the collector would say, claiming he had been duped. “[They’re claiming] I live up in the hills and am calling all the shots. I’m like, “What are you, nuts, with all this craziness?” I buy things from people! That’s the way it is.” 
Whether true or not, the retrieval of the prop didn’t ensure the longevity of the film – after garnering terrible reviews, any further sequels were promptly canned. 
By the third Blade movie, Wesley Snipes felt his titular character had been sidelined by a duo of new vampire hunters played by Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel. He sulked in his trailer for most of the shoot, scowled whenever Reynolds was in his company and at one point refused to open his eyes when asked to do so by director David S Goyer – requiring Goyer to give Blade CGI peepers. 
Goyer felt so threatened by Snipes he tried to hire a group of Hells Angels he met at a strip bar to pose as his security, according to Patton Oswalt, who had a smaller part in the production. 
“I have tremendous respect for Wesley as an actor. He used to be a friend. We’re not friends anymore,” Goyer would say. “I don’t think anyone involved in that film had a good experience on that film, certainly I didn’t. I don’t think anybody involved with that film is happy with the results. It was a very tortured production.”
Tim Burton’s Man of Steel movie, Superman Lives, was to have starred Nicolas Cage as the eponymous wearer of tights and smiter of foes, with a script by Nineties indie darling Kevin Smith.
The film never got made and Superman may have considered himself as having a lucky escape. Producer Jon Peters (who had worked with Burton on 1989’s Batman) had a clear idea what he wanted – and it isn’t the Superman we know from Christopher Reeves. 
“One, I don’t want to see him in that suit,” said Peters (according to Smith) about the most iconic threads in pop culture history. “Two, I don’t want to see him fly. And three, he’s got to fight a giant spider in the third act…” The spider was reportedly a demand from the marketing department to help sell merchandise. 
In a late postscript to this bizarre anecdote, Cage’s Superman did take to the skies after all. He cameos in the atrocious The Flash film, in a parallel universe flashback in which he teams up with Reeve’s Superman… to fight a giant spider. 
Early in the Franchise, director Eric (Daniel Brühl) is shooting a big sequence involving a race of “fishmen”. It’s a centrepiece of the film – until an executive flies in and decides the fishmen have to go. The scene taps on the long history of superhero films being improvised on the fly. An example is Brian Singer’s 2006 reboot, Superman Returns, which entered production with just a single scene nailed down. 
“I had a meeting with Bryan Singer where he gave his broad pitch for the film then I was basically given ‘Superman saves a plane carrying a space shuttle and it has to end in a baseball stadium.’” remembered storyboard artist Gabriel Hardman. “That’s it.”
Remarkably, after the sequence was presented to execs in CGI form, they greenlit – and it became the centrepiece of the final film. It’s a shame the rest of the ill-fated sequel failed to match its ambition. 
Norton is notorious for regarding his movies – even big studio tent poles – as a collaborative process and was keen to bring his opinions on board when he played Bruce Banner, aka the Hulk, in the early Marvel Universe film. But his interjections did not go down well with Marvel and, in a funk, Norton refused to promote the movie – leading Marvel to recast the more amiable Mark Ruffalo as the green-skinned good guy in The Avengers and to pointedly state that the studio required “an actor who embodies the creativity and collaborative spirit of our other talented cast members”. There are shades of Norton’s Hulk in The Franchise’s lead actor Adam (Billy Magnussen) – a moviestar lunk whose ad-libs drive director Eric to distraction. 
Ruffalo’s casting was a last-minute affair. With the Avengers team set to be unveiled at Comic-Con, he received a late-hour call from his agent. “Look out your window at five o’clock in the morning. If there is a car there, you got the part. If there’s not, just go back to bed.” The car was there, Ruffalo climbed out of bed – and superhero history was made. 
Years before he was a comedic internet baddie, Musk popped up in Iron Man 2 with a dreadful cameo as himself – it turns out he is even worse at acting than being funny on social media. It is rumoured that he had demanded to be included in the movie after allowing Marvel to use his SpaceX rocket complex in Hawthorne, California, as a stand-in for the hide-out for Sam Rockwell’s villain, Justin Hammer. Meanwhile, director Jon Favreau was forced to recreate the Monaco Grand Prix in a car park adjacent to the studio after F1 supremo Bernie Eccleston withdrew permission to film at the real event.  
Wunderkind director Trank was fast-tracked to the superhero A-list after the success of his gritty comic book indie movie, Chronicle. It was too much too soon, and Fox executives were alarmed by reports of eccentric behaviour on the set. Trank’s studio debut duly tanked – not helped by a tweet he sent on release weekend saying “a year ago I had a fantastic version of this…You’ll probably never see it.”
“Trank showed up late to set,” said one eyewitness. “Some days he didn’t show up at all. He treated crew terribly. He trashed the house the production company rented for him. From what I’m told he did a couple hundred grand worth of damage… Trank did so much damage to the house that [Fox CEO] Jim Gianopulos came to Baton Rouge and personally apologised to the owners.”
The star who has given method acting a bad name tried to get into the character of the Joker by posting live rats and bullets to his fellow Suicide Squad crew. They were not amused – nor were audiences forced to sit through Leto’s interpretation of Batman’s nemesis as an edge lord with the maturity of a 14-year-old boy who’s just shoplifted his first vape.
Working with Leto was evidently a chore. Will Smith recalls being present when Harley Quinn actress Margot Robbie received one of Leto’s “gifts”. 
“This dude walks in and goes, ‘I have a message from Mr J’. And he puts a box down in front of Margot being like this is a gift from Mr J in honor of your relationship,” said Smith.
“Margot starts to open the box, and there’s a note from the Joker. And I was like, ‘That’s cool. That’s funny. Jared is like taking it real seriously’… And Margot opened the box and there was a live rat in the box. I was playing Deadshot, but if I had pearls on I would have clutched them.”
Leto, however, felt that his behaviour had been cast in an unfavourable light.  
“Any of the very few gifts that were ever given were given with a spirit of fun and adventure and received with laughter, fun, and adventure,” he said in 2021. ”I’m an artist at the end of the day. If I do something risky and you don’t like it, basically, you can kiss my ass.”
Zack Snyder stepped down from his uncompleted Batman v Superman sequel after the tragic death of his daughter. In his place, Avengers director Joss Whedon was parachuted in with orders to give Snyder’s Wagnerian glum-fest a breezy makeover – to essentially make it more like Avengers.
But Superman actor Henry Cavill was busy shooting the new Mission: Impossible, where his character had a prominent moustache. Returning to Justice League for extensive reshoots, Cavill’s ’tache was intact – and the overworked CGI department did a middling job of erasing it in post-production. 
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