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Ace directors Joe and Anthony Russo have already cemented their filmmaking legacy with four of perhaps the best MCU entries: “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” “Captain America: Civil War,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” and “Avengers: Endgame.”
Now they’ve turned their considerable skills towards Simon Stålenhag’s dreamy retro-futuristic worldbuilding for Netflix’s “The Electric State” — a sci-fi fantasy adventure landing on Netflix on March 14, 2025 — and we’ve got the final launch trailer to share packed with an eccentric parade of roaming robots and surviving humans trying to navigate fractured life. Oh, and a robot version of Mr Peanut… for some reason.
Those who’ve never encountered Stålenhag’s original works have missed out on his remarkable digital art and designs featuring the littered rural landscapes of a discarded alternative past populated by colossal abandoned machines, derelict contraptions, and rusted remnants of decades-old wars. Fans might also recall Prime Video’s superb sci-fi anthology, “Tales From The Loop” in 2020, adapted from Stålenhag’s first art book from 2015 and later made into a tabletop RPG.
Adapted from the visionary Swedish artist’s 2018 graphic novel of the same name, “The Electric State” is the most expensive endeavor ever undertaken in the history of Netflix, made for a whopping $320 million! It’s fortified with the star power of Chris Pratt (“Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Jurassic World”) and Millie Bobby Brown (“Stranger Things”), and as you can see by the final trailer, this costly production is a chaotic, eye-popping project showcasing spectacular visual effects.
“The Electric State” invites us into the unhinged realm of an alternative 1990s in the wake of a massive robot uprising. We hook up with an orphaned teenager named Michelle who wanders across the American West looking for Christopher, her lost younger brother, accompanied by Cosmo, a cartoonish robot, a war veteran smuggler called Keats, and his wisecracking utility ‘bot sidekick, Herman.
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“It’s never been done before, this fusion between live action and animation,” producer Angela Russo-Otstot revealed to Netflix. “There’s more CGI animation happening than Anthony and Joe did on their biggest films at Marvel. It was a really beautiful opportunity for all of these artists to come together — the visual artists who helped create the robots and the technical artists who helped get them to their final rendering. The voice artists brought these characters to life in postproduction, but the motion capture actors are the ones who gave the robots their soul.”
Crafted using a screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and also starring Ke Huy Quan, Jason Alexander, Woody Norman, Giancarlo Esposito, Stanley Tucci, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, Hank Azaria, Colman Domingo and Alan Tudyk, “The Electric State” appears only on Netflix March 14, 2025.