The Founder
On why the person who builds the product is not the person who scales it.
- Director
- John Lee Hancock
- Year
- 2016
- Runtime
- 115 min
The McDonald brothers designed the kitchen — that scene of chalk marks on the ground is a production-line optimisation. Kroc designed not the kitchen but the distribution, and the company became his.
The film tells this as a tragedy and it is right to, but there is an uncomfortable truth underneath: the brothers ran the system perfectly at the scale they built it for and refused to take it one step further.
Three stars; Keaton is good but the film repeats itself in the last half hour.