By 
Five years since Joe and Anthony Russo unleashed Avengers: Endgame on the world, the pair are finally returning to the big sci-fi action genre, this time in a brand new world. But just like the Avengers, many of the heroes of this new world are… assembled.
This weekend, audiences at MCM London got a first glimpse at just what that new film will look like.
The new movie, inspired by artist Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel The Electric State, is coming to Netflix next year. But the Russos have been working on it since before Thanos had finished assembling the infinity stones.
The graphic novel first came to the Russos’ attention when it was still a Kickstarter project. It was discovered by Chris Marcus, who with his writing partner Steve McFeely, wrote the scripts for the Russos’ Marvel movies. Immediately all four of them fell in love with it.
“We fell in love with the artwork,” Russo says during a panel at MCM London. “There’s a very loose narrative behind the artwork, but you could see the worldbuilding in the book and you could feel the themes that he was playing with. They were profound and very topical themes about technology, very cleverly placed in an alternate period of the 1990s, and we felt it was a very rich world we could tell a story in and that’s what started the journey.”
Simon Stålenhag’s artwork has achieved a cult following, with his work already inspiring Prime’s Tales from the Loop anthology, and several tabletop RPGs. His art is characterized by retrofuturist science fiction tech intermingled with mundane, everyday environments. But turning those images into a film is no small task.
As Anthony Russo says, “[The film] took a while to develop because while Simon Stålenhag’s artwork is so intriguing, you look at it and it is set in our shared past, but it is not exactly what we know to be our shared past… It took quite a long time to find a narrative in that space.”
The Happiest Place on Earth?
That narrative formed around the character of Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), and her search for her brother. In bringing Stålenhag’s imagery to the screen, the Russos worked with Dennis Gassner – “One of the greatest production designers of all time” as Joe Russo calls him. His work includes The Truman Show, three Bond movies, and Bladerunner 2049, among many others.
“We had to build the world out with Simon’s incredible work as an inspiration,” Joe Russo says.
The audience at MCM were treated to a glimpse of that world with an exclusive clip that filled in some of The Electric State’s backstory, featuring grainy black and white footage of robot factories at the dawn of this world’s age of robots, and surprisingly, a glimpse of Walt Disney himself.
“This is a 1990s where Walt Disney’s animatronic inventions in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s had gained sentience,” Russo says. “After gaining sentience, they demanded equal rights and fought humanity for those equal rights, and the move starts right at the end of that battle.”
The Russos then went on to explain how this backstory, which they invented inspired by Stålenhag’s art, informed the look of the robots in The Electric State.
“Their roots are from Disney and they were developed to be very palatable and friendly, non-threatening, and part of the tone and humour of the movie is that these very cartoonish robots at some point make a decision to go to war with us to protect themselves,” Joe Russo tells the audience. “So the question behind the design around all the robots was, ‘How is this the most palatable version of a mail delivery robot? Or a chef robot? Or the giant kitty bot that’s an advertising bot? So the film is built on that tenet of approachability, but that runs into violence.”
The creation of those robots starts with their voice actors, including names such as Jenny Slate, Anthony Mackie, and Alan Tudyk.
Anthony Russo’s personal favourite robot is a top-hatted, talking peanut voiced by Woody Harrelson.
“Mr Peanut is particularly delightful,” he says. “He is the leader of the robot rebellion and there’s just something deliciously ridiculous in that that we had a lot of fun with.”
As is the norm these days, the movies robots are a combination of real animatronics and CGI, using the voice actor’s performance as a template to build from.
“We always combine all the tech we have at our disposal to get to the best version of the story,” Joe Russo tells Den of Geek in an exclusive interview after the panel. But he also points out that the voice cast aren’t the only people behind the robots’ performances.
“We use some incredible performances by motion capture artists. Terry Notary, who was responsible for all the ape portrayals in the [Planet of the] Apes films, he and his troupe did a lot of performing for the robots in the film,” Joe Russo says.
But ultimately, The Electric State is a human story, built around the lead performances of Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt.
In a behind the scenes clip during the MCM event, audiences saw the pair looking around the set of a kind of black market supermarket of items retrieved from “the exclusion zone”, including a cavalcade of ‘90s paraphernalia. The high point was watching Pratt try to explain to Brown what a Billy Bass was.
“Milly and Chris we’re in the right spirit of the tone we wanted to achieve for this movie,” Joe Russo tells the panel audience. “They have a certain approachability and humour, but with real emotion and sensitivity to it. Both are great at playing flawed characters and the movie at its heart is a bunch of broken characters who come together to form a new family.”
The Electric State premieres on Netflix on March 14 2025.
The post How The Electric State Sees the Russo Brothers Return to Big Sci-Fi Action appeared first on Den of Geek.
