Popverse's top stories of the day

• Dragon Ball Daima is retconning a retcon and changing everything fans know about Piccolo
• She-Hulk herself, Tatiana Maslany, is joining Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
• DC Studios co-head James Gunn explains how DC onscreen canon actually works now that Creature Commandos hits the restart button

Anyone who’s checked out HBO’s hilarious The Franchise will be all too familiar with Tecto: Eye of the Storm, the fictional movie at the center of both the show and the show’s fictional ‘Maximum Cinematic Universe.’ (Yes, we see it too.) At New York Comic Con 2024, the team behind the show revealed a surprising tidbit: Tecto is actually far more of a real thing than it may seem.

Talking during the Friday panel, series creator and showrunner Jon Brown confirmed that there is, in fact, a 30-page plot treatment for Tecto: Eye of the Storm, and how it falls in the larger Maximum Cinematic Universe.

“I think it’s really important to feel that we’re on really solid ground, even if we don’t always stop the show to necessarily explain that,” he explained. “As long as we knew where we were inside the plot [of the movie] in every episode, it was really important. The world building on a show like this is really crucial. We spent a lot of time talking about that in the room. We wrote a really detailed treatment for the movie, spent a lot of time thinking about other properties, what phase we were in, where Centurios 2 fits, what comes out of it — but the show moves really quickly, so sometimes you only catch that detail in the background. We’ve got it all in our heads when we really need it.”

Of course, when he says “we,” what he actually means is, the series’ writers.

“I don’t think any of the cast have any idea what’s happening in the movie,” Brown continued. “I remember, we were shooting in Scotland, and there was a scene where Richard [E. Grant] is walking out of this green hula-hoop that’s going to be a portal, and Billy [Magnussen]’s following him. They were asking questions, and I was like, ‘sorry, do you want to know what’s happening in the scene?’ Billy’s like, ‘Yes!’ and Richard’s like, ‘Honestly, don’t give a fuck.’ It was a really hot day, and he’s got a helmet on, and this really big robe, and he’s all, ‘Genuinely, I don’t give a shit.’”

The Franchise airs Sundays on HBO and streaming on Max. Look out for more from the NYCC panel for The Franchise on Popverse soon.

Popverse is providing wall-to-wall coverage of New York Comic Con 2024, with an all-star crew of writers, editors, and video producers there all four days (and nights). You can follow along to this coverage right here. Or perhaps you're just looking to livestream the biggest panels as they happen; we've got you covered right here!