The Russo brothers’ hugely expensive sci-fi adventure The Electric State is reportedly due to stream on Netflix in March 2025.
Joe and Anthony Russo have been lured back into the Marvel machine with the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday, but the filmmaking brothers are still finishing work on their sci-fi adventure The Electric State for Netflix.
Buried in a tangentially related story over at Deadline is the news that The Electric State is scheduled for release on Netflix in March 2025 – which sounds about right, given that initial filming on the movie reportedly wrapped in February 2023.
Production on the movie, adapted from the 2018 illustrated novel of the same name, is said to have been somewhat troubled, however. Per World Of Reel, the shoot had to be paused in October 2022 when a crewmember died in an accident unrelated to the production itself; there was also a round of reshoots which reportedly took place in the spring of 2024.
None of which quite explains the film’s absolutely enormous budget, which is reckoned to be as much as $320m. The film’s setting and need for extensive visual effects is likely one factor in that eye-watering figure; The Electric State stars Millie Bobbie Brown as a teenager, who, with robot friend in tow, traverses a post-apocalyptic America looking for her missing brother. The supporting cast includes Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan and Stanley Tucci, while Brian Cox, Anthony Mackie and Billy Bob Thornton will be lending their voices to certain characters.
Some of the imagery in the original novel, written by Simon Stalenhag, is stunning, with the shells of gigantic robots littering the landscape; it’s easy to imagine how a filmmaker like Gareth Edwards could realise these on the big screen quite affordably, Monsters style. To date, not a single official production photo has emerged from the Russo Brothers’ adaptation (our lead image is from the novel), so we can only guess at the kind of scale the filmmakers have gone for.
Beginning their careers in television, the Russo Brothers have grown accustomed to making films on gigantic budgets, from Avengers: Endgame (price tag: as much as $400m before tax credits) to Netflix thriller The Gray Man ($200m). The streaming giant has said that it’s making an effort to rein in its expenditure on movies in recent months, however, and so The Electric State could represent the peak of Netflix’s big-budget genre offerings.
We’ll bring you confirmation of The Electric State’s release date – and who knows, maybe a trailer – when we get it.
$320 million seems like a ludricous budget.
I've always wondered, how do streaming movies make money at all? Does Netflix really make enough money to justify spending this much on a movie?
Yeah it's pretty insane, for that kind of money it better be fantastic. Although I think nowadays the link between money and quality (to whatever degree it ever existed) is weaker than it's ever been.
Well they certainly make enough money, last quarters revenue was roughly 9.5 billion dollar. Sure you got server costs, salaries and licensing for old content that eat up a lot, but if you are getting over 3 billion per month from your subscribers you should be able to find some budget for expensive content.
I don't think a movie like this will be efficient in $/h watched, those will go to cheap series and people putting on their favorite comfort show in the background for the 10th rerun. But they probably still need those big tent pole movies for psychological reasons. It's good for marketing towards new subscribers and for user retention you will need the occasional blockbuster movie. Don't need to be that many per year, since as said the vast majority of time will be spend watching some simple stuff, but you do need fresh content for the occasional movie night. Or people will start looking at the competition that offers those and which also has plenty of mindless entertainment.