I’ve been waiting for The Founder to open for months.  Starring Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, it tells the story of the founding of McDonald’s restaurants.  As business junkies and professors know, McDonald’s was an innovation: it created the modern franchise, identical restaurants run by individual entrepreneurs in locations across the country and, eventually, the world.  It also represented a critical development in the history of fast food, transferring the assembly line from the factory floor to the kitchen.  Most basic business classes talk a lot about McDonald’s, because the franchise system – and the degree of control that McDonald’s corporate exercises – raise interesting questions about agency law and the definition of employment.

[Spoilers under the cut, not very if you already know the story]

The movie doesn’t exactly put McDonald’s in the best light.  It begins as a kind of business fairytale: down-on-his-luck, fast-talking traveling salesman Ray Kroc discovers the McDonald brothers and their wildly successful San Bernadino restaurant, and resolves to take them national.  These early parts of the movie are a paean to the balletic beauty of the business model – literally – and the outstanding quality of McDonald’s food, but even then, there’s a sly humor: you can’t listen to the McDonald brothers wax poetic about their burgers and their determination to avoid “crass commercialism” without mentally contrasting the McDonald’s restaurants of today.

From these optimistic beginnings, things head down a darker road, and the film does a masterful job of gradually transferring the viewer’s sympathies from Kroc to the brothers.  Kroc signs a contract with the brothers to set up a franchising operation, with the brothers given ultimate control over how each restaurant is run.  They quickly clash: Kroc wants to make changes as circumstances demand, but the brothers are rigid in their adherence to their methods.  At first, the brothers seem unreasonable.  Kroc is just as committed as they are to maintaining their standards, but the brothers refuse to allow any of the necessary flexibility involved in setting up restaurants at multiple locations.  Over time, however, Kroc begins to cut the brothers out using real estate (which would also eventually become a famed part of the business model – McDonald’s has been described as a real estate company with a few restaurants).  Ultimately Kroc’s ruthlessness turns out great for the company, and not so great for most of the people who come into contact with him.

Ultimately, then, the movie is less a story about business methods than about character: namely, Kroc’s character, manically portrayed by Keaton, as his growing success allows his innate selfishness and cynicism to take free reign. 

In at least one respect, though, the movie seems a bit unfair to Kroc.  He takes ideas from other people right and left, claiming credit for them (hence the irony of the film’s title, “The Founder”), until the point where the brothers accuse him of never coming up with any ideas of his own.

But that’s not quite true.  Kroc was the only one who could make the uniform franchise model work, at a time when individual restaurant owners expected to manage their locations as they saw fit.  His innovation was to pitch franchise ownership as a gateway to middle-class life, selling prefabricated businesses to post-World War II families like prefabricated homes. 

It’s ironic that the movie comes out now, just as that model seems to be breaking down.  The restaurants have come under serious pressure from fast-casual chains like Chipotle’s, and the NLRB has been contending that McDonald’s has joint-employer status with its franchisees.  If the NLRB wins, it would mean that McDonald’s would be on the hook for labor violations at individual restaurants, and that employees across the country could unionize more easily.  Of course, with Trump’s election and his nomination of Andrew Puzder for labor secretary, McDonald’s may get a second wind.