The Russo Brothers are in a transitional era. After leaving the Marvel Cinematic Universe on a high with back-to-back Avengers movies, the filmmaking team dabbled in creating franchises of their own with Extraction and The Gray Man, both of which premiered on Netflix. But after a brief reprieve, the Russos will return to the mothership for another pair of Avengers adventures: Doomsday and Secret Wars.
Before that happens, however, the Russos have one more movie in the works: the Netflix original The Electric State. Like their other recent projects, it’s not based on a popular IP, but it appears to share some of the epic scale and genre trappings of the MCU. The Electric State is a sci-fi road trip slated for release early next year. We finally have our first glimpse of the movie and it’s set in a sentient robot wasteland that could rival Marvel itself.
The Electric State, based on the 2018 book of the same name by Simon Stålenhag, is set in an alternate version of 1994, in the wake of a massive conflict between robots and humans. The humans won, and the remaining robots were exiled to an exclusion zone. The movie follows Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), a young woman who believes a robot holds the secret to finding her long-lost brother. Accompanying her is Keats (Chris Pratt), a veteran who now works as a smuggler; and a construction robot named Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie.)
As they traverse the robot ghetto, they find a band of robots who want to fight for their rights, led by Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson.) Yes, this is the actual Planters mascot, in “marketing robot” form. The goofiness of the character choice is very deliberate.
“The intent was to create complex feelings for you, where it’s both funny and tragic at the same time,” Joe Russo told Vanity Fair. “The mythology behind the film is that robots were created in this world to be pleasing to the eye, to feel non-threatening, to make you love them. To make you smile, to sell you things, to take care of you. So they have a cartoonish aspect to them by design in the movie.”
It’s exactly the kind of movie the Russos need to get them back into the swing of things: whimsical and full of sci-fi lore, but also decidedly more silly than the Avengers movies with their monumental plot twists.
“This movie is actually a remarkable sort of bridge for us back to that,” Anthony Russo told Vanity Fair. “It’s an interesting prelude to returning to Marvel and trying to continue that story forward.”
