Mountainhead almost served as a spin-off film to HBO’s Succession – Until director Jesse Armstrong changed his mind

Jesse Armstrong made his directorial debut with Mountainhead, casting Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef as four wealthy elites enjoying their lives amidst global turmoil. Before the film, the director had created the acclaimed series Succession, for which he earned four consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series.

Interestingly, and recently, he was talking to TV Guide, where he revealed that this film was almost set in the Succession universe. However, he considered that they are different in tone, so this became a movie in its own right. He said that:

"As the piece developed, although the look of the film I think people will find quite similar to Succession — I borrowed a lot of talent and leant on a lot of colleagues from that show — the tone of it's actually kind of different."

He didn't want to mislead people, he also said.

Mountainhead is about AI's potential to do harm

The film is a directorial debut for Armstrong. (Image via Max)

Artificial intelligence today is shaping up to be a groundbreaking technology, especially for those who created it. While AI has primarily delivered deepfakes and misinformation so far, Jesse Armstrong also sees its evolution leading to potential harm, as Variety noted in an interview with him.

He said:

"The thing is we just don’t know, and that’s part of the film. It’s about being at that moment of not knowing, and what a scary and sometimes funny place that can be."

Mountainhead sees four billionaire friends chilling in the mountains while the rest of the world is in upheaval, specifically due to AI-generated misinformation roaming freely on the fictional social platform called Traam. Well, this premise closely mirrors current realities on social media platforms and resonates with what people are fear regarding AI.

While Armstrong didn't really draw inspiration from any real-life figures, it is easy to connect the film's characters to certain names we won't name. But seriously, AI and social media are a bad combination today.

The saddest part of the film is that the global chaos didn't get better but worse. That is something that ought to be one of the takeaways of the film. Thankfully, we haven't come up to this point. Yet.

Succession is more about a media conglomerate

Succession follows the Roy family with Brian Cox playing the patriarch. (Image via HBO)

Succession fans are likely to find similarities between the show and Mountainhead. It's coming from the very mind of Jesse Armstrong. That would be one reason for that. However, that is still different in many aspects.

Although it's about blue bloods too, these ones are about a global media conglomerate. Information flows through mainstream media too, but AI is yet to properly plague it like it did with other social media platforms.

Both his projects are a critical success now

Maybe Succession and Mountainhead are different in their own rights, but they were both critical successes. As of this writing, Succession has an average Rotten Tomatoes rating of 95% and is considered one of the greatest TV series of all time. For Mountainhead, its critical score is 78%.