“This guy has a mustache. Wait, not just a mustache…a quirky mustache! He’s also English and stumbles and bumbles his way through various misadventures while joking about his mustache!”

“Brilliant! Attach a big star, and we can make a franchise out of it!”

The above does not reflect the opinions of reasonable people, but rather the hypothetical consensus reached by a group of studio execs in a boardroom meeting who are all completely detached from any sort of reality.

That, I can only assume, is how “Mortdecai” came into being.

Anyone who saw a second of its aggressive marketing campaign won’t be shocked to find out “Mortdecai” is hot garbage. At no point did this Johnny Depp vehicle about an idiotic, whimsical art thief remotely resemble a decent movie.

It’s fascinating because of how it represents Hollywood’s franchise-starved hubris. Someone, somewhere assumed there was a large audience of people who find English accents and general buffoonery extremely funny.

They were wrong, as “Mortdecai” had an embarrassing opening weekend at the box office.

To put it simply, it’s just not funny. At all. Depp’s desperate, flailing attempts at silliness aren’t just unfunny; they’re downright annoying.

However, the film incorrectly assumes you’re enjoying his performance so much that he even narrates each scene he isn’t in, even when what’s happening on-screen is entirely obvious. The rest of the cast, which includes Ewan McGregor and Gwyneth Paltrow, fails to bring any life to the proceedings, as well.

“Mortdecai” preys on the assumption that English accents signal sophistication in a profoundly irritating way. It’s as lowbrow as any slapstick Hollywood comedy, but it tries to mask this by making Depp occasionally namedrop artists the audience may have never heard of.

Did I mention the mustache jokes? Somewhere around 15 to 20 percent of the script is dedicated to terrible cracks about Depp’s curly mustache. It’s basically what would happen if someone transmuted the essence of one of those magnetic car mustaches into a roll of film.

At a certain point, we have only ourselves to blame for the existence of “Mortdecai.” We feed the Hollywood sequel machine with our movie tickets, giving studios excuses to produce excrement like this in hopes of finding something profitable enough to turn into a franchise.

Luckily, precious few beside myself actually bothered seeing “Mortdecai,” so we probably won’t have to worry about more of this down the road. In the meantime, I’ll be busy wishing I could forget about it.