AGBO Creative Chief spills details about the upcoming sci-fi film, The Electric State

The Russo brothers have quite a bit on their plate. Not only are they returning to one of the biggest franchises in movies with future Avengers films, but the brothers’ artist-led production company, AGBO, is also bringing the Citadel franchise to Prime Video with its many incarnations, as well as finally releasing their long-awaited sci-fi film, The Electric State, next year in March. The Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown film would finally secure a rating from the MPA with a PG-13 for sci-fi violence/action, language and some thematic material.

The Hollywood Reporter recently got to sit down with the Russo’s sister, Angela Russo-Otstot, who is the Creative Chief for AGBO, as she talks about the upcoming projects from their company. Russo-Otstot would divulge some details about The Electric State. She calls the film “a really interesting exploration of a world where service robots live alongside humans. Within their time performing specific services for humans, the robots start to realize that they may want something more than the purpose they [were made] for, and the humans begin to fear this. So, eventually, a conflict plays out. There’s a war between the humans and the robots, and the humans leverage technology to win, and they take all of the robots and banish them into an exclusion zone in the middle of a desert wasteland in the center of the U.S. But it’s a global conflict as well. So there are other stories and narratives that can play out in different countries around the world, but we witness the U.S. story in this film.”

Russo-Otstot also mentions that the robots “have a real nostalgia to them.” Some of them are based on actual brands, like Woody Harrelson’s Mr. Peanut-inspired robot. “And I remember when we had to approach Hormel to ask permission to do this. We were like: ‘It has to be Mr. Peanut. We have to make this work.’ And fortunately, it did work out.”

The Russo sister also talks a bit of the background behind the film, saying, “It’s a wonderfully imaginative alternate history that takes place in the 1990s. It’s based on an illustrated novel by an artist [from Sweden] named Simon Stålenhag.” It was adapted by frequent Russo and Marvel collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. “They were the writers that did all four of the Marvel movies that Anthony and Joe directed. They work at our company as the co-presidents of story department. Christopher found this book on Facebook in a crowdfunding. And he said, there’s a movie here. And so we optioned the book, and he and Stephen built out a really rich mythology. There was an existing mythology in the book, but they expanded upon it.”