The Russo Brothers Tried to Revolutionize Streaming … What Went Wrong?

Joe and Anthony Russo, the Cleveland-born filmmakers who started off directing small-scale comedies and episodes of “Arrested Development” before being knighted by the Marvel Studios apparatus, have a long history of saying provocative stuff in interviews. Sometimes you get the sense that they truly believe what they’re saying (Anthony proclaimed that everything developed at their studio AGBO “has universe potential”), other times it comes off as something more cartoonishly antagonistic (like when Joe said “this idea that the theater is a sacred space is bulls–t”).

But in the lead-up to their latest, a $320 million sci-fi extravaganza for Netflix called “The Electric State,” they were oddly quiet.

There was no declaration of intent, no premature announcement of a series of interconnected movies and series that make up a vast, overarching “Electric State” mythology. Instead, there was a smattering of polite interviews and a worldwide promotional tour that included stops in Los Angeles, Madrid and London.

At the Los Angeles premiere, actual robots walked the red carpet via a partnership with the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory at UCLA’s Samueli School of Engineering. The screening started 45 minutes late, which was enough time to finish your complementary box of popcorn and start to wonder if it was worth it at all. Netflix must have felt the same way.

“The Electric State” premiered on Netflix earlier this month to just 25 million views in its first three days. That’s a little over half the 43 million who tuned into the Russo Brothers’ last Netflix would-be blockbuster “The Gray Man” in its first weekend in 2022, and below last year’s top-watched Netflix movies made for a fraction of the cost: “Carry-On” hit 42 million views in its first three days, Millie Bobby Brown’s fantasy film “Damsel” scored 35.3 million and the thriller “Rebel Ridge” opened to 31.2 million views. And the reviews were abysmal: “The Electric State” sits at 16% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The film is the third ambitious streaming movie the Russos have directed since steering the one-two punch of “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame” for Marvel, two of the highest-grossing movies in history. And despite speaking confidently about upending cinema after their Marvel exit, the brothers are now back at Marvel directing two more gigantic “Avengers” movies with a graveyard of never-delivered spinoffs, franchise expansions and model-breaking ideas in their streaming wake.

“To their credit, they properly rode that post-‘Avengers’ wave,” a Netflix insider told TheWrap of the Russos’ post-Marvel run. “Creatively almost none of it works which of course leads to questions about the creative skills outside of Marvel, but you can’t fault them for building on their success.”

A producer who has worked with Netflix assessed the situation thusly: “What went wrong with ‘Electric State’ is Netflix giving them an absolutely ridiculous amount of money and the creative sucks. The question really is, Are they good filmmakers or just good Marvel filmmakers?”

Humble beginnings

The Russo Brothers’ feature debut “Pieces” premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in 1997. Financed through $30,000 in student loans and credit card debt, “Pieces” was never released theatrically but it did gain the attention of Steven Soderbergh, who produced the Russos’ follow-up, “Welcome to Collinwood,” a remake of 1958 Italian crime caper “Big Deal on Madonna Street.” The movie made less than $5 million but the next year they started directing episodes of “Arrested Development,” including the pilot. The Russos were incredibly important in developing the look and feel of the series, with its faux documentary tics, and were involved in casting too. The show struggled to find a wide audience but became sacred text to comedy aficionados and the brothers won an Emmy for their work.

They directed a feature, in 2006, for Universal called “You, Me and Dupree,” that made over $130 million, and continued to direct episodes of television, like the short-lived airport-set drama “LAX.” But it was a pair of “Community” episodes — “A Fistful of Paintballs” and “For a Few Paintballs More” — that attracted the attention of Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. After a hearty recommendation from Soderbergh, the Russos directed 2014’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” followed by the considerably more complex “Captain America: Civil War” in 2016, which grossed more than $1 billion.

Then the Russos signed on for two more Marvel projects — the gargantuan “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame.” They were a long way from Cleveland.

Into the streaming world

It’s easy to see why, in the wake of their success with the “Avengers” movies, the Russos would start to dream bigger.

The brothers’ production studio AGBO was announced in 2015 and formally launched in 2017. Anthony and Joe would serve as co-chairmen, with their frequent Marvel collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely named co-presidents of story in 2018.  They produced high-concept features like Chadwick Boseman’s “21 Bridges” and “Extraction,” led by their “Avengers” star Chris Hemsworth and directed by Sam Hargrave, a trusted stunt coordinator and second unit director. They also produced “Everything Everywhere All At Once” for A24, which would eventually become an Academy Awards powerhouse.

But they had even more complicated plans for themselves.

Their first directorial effort post-“Avengers” was Apple’s “Cherry,” an addiction drama based on a bestseller and starring another “Avengers” cast member, Tom Holland. Full of ostentatious technical flourishes, it was pilloried by critics and failed to earn Holland an Oscar nomination.

An “artistic statement” popped up onscreen when you went to play “Cherry” on Apple TV+, which read:

“As filmmakers, we have always been compelled to disrupt form and defy expectations. We’re devious by nature. We poke fun at subjects, genres and ideas as much as we examine or pay homage to them. It’s intrinsic to our fatalist sense of humor and to our determined commitment to life as a prosaic exercise. It’s what has allowed us to craft a singular career path, devoid of external influence. Choosing to follow up the sentimentally elegant ‘400 Blows’ with the absurdist ‘Shoot the Piano Player,’ Francois Truffaut said, ‘I took my pleasure as my only rule of conduct.’ As young filmmakers, that quote became our engine. ‘Cherry’ is yet another example. These are the films that inspired us to push the limits of how we constructed its darkly comic tale.”  

They were clearly trying to upend what a “streaming movie” meant by presenting “Cherry” in chapters, each with a distinct aesthetic, provocatively pushing the boundaries and comparing themselves to Truffaut.

Their next project, 2022’s Netflix action movie “The Gray Man,” starring Ryan Gosling and – yes! – another “Avengers” actor, this time Chris Evans, was designed with even bigger aspirations.

The project, which the Russos had been developing at Sony around the time they were making “The Winter Soldier,” was a traditional spy movie based on a novel by Mark Greaney. But they saw much more.

“This is being conceived as a series of films, and again, potentially branching out, we could follow other characters, but we’re not going to answer every question in the movie. So you’re going to finish the movie [and] have a complete story, but you’re still going to have questions about the wider universe. And I think that’s one way to break the model a little bit, is to not give the audience everything in one film. Don’t have a close-ended narrative. Have an open-ended narrative that’s [like] a chapter in a book,” Joe told Collider.

“The Gray Man” similarly received poor reviews (45% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a sequel or spinoff has yet to materialize (although it is still in the top 10 of most-watched Netflix movies). But the Russos applied a similar approach to “Citadel,” their mega-budget Amazon Studios spy series that debuted in 2023. The show was plagued with production issues — original showrunners Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec left during production, with alternate cuts being created and tested for Amazon brass (they ultimately chose a version of the series imagined by the Russos) — and the first six episodes wound up costing a reported $300 million, making it the most expensive television series ever. And the initial show was just the beginning.

Jennifer Salke, the just-ousted head of Amazon Studios, pitched the Russos on an idea as madcap as anything they could come up with on their own — an American-made show that would then spread across multiple other series, produced in other countries in their native languages, connected by a single, overarching universe. “The idea that we could create a story that not only traveled around the world but was created around the world seemed like a very exciting movement forward,” Anthony told The New York Times.

A second season of “Citadel” was ordered and shot (although recent reports suggest Season 2 is being delayed from fall 2025 to sometime in 2026) and two of the international spinoffs — “Citadel: Diana” from Italy and “Citadel: Honey Bunny” from India — premiered a few weeks apart from one another last fall. “It’s like we’re a bunch of jazz musicians passing music back and forth to one another as we’re playing, and it’s an incredible thing,” Anthony said at the time. No other series have been announced and with Salke gone, the “Citadel” gambit seems even fuzzier, with the same report citing that further spinoffs in the “Citadel” universe have been paused.

What’s interesting is that “Extraction,” which was written by Joe and produced by the brothers, had lower stakes and became a bigger sensation. The first movie was a huge hit for Netflix — it scored 99 million views in its first month in 2020, then a record for a Netflix original — and it inspired a sequel that also pulled big numbers (42 million views in its first week). There’s a spinoff streaming series in the works and a third movie coming from Hemsworth and Hargrave. But even more crucially, according to someone close with the streamer, “Extraction” provided Netflix with something that they didn’t have up until that point: “a big action franchise.”

“Electric” feel

“The Electric State” was originally meant to be a theatrically released studio movie, with AGBO partnering with Universal on an adaptation of Simon Stålenhag’s moodily illustrated novel about an alternate history 1990s in the immediate aftermath of a war with robots. By 2022, the rights had transferred to Netflix, where the Russos had just made “The Gray Man.” It made sense, since its star Millie Bobby Brown was already a part of the Netflix family between “Stranger Things” and the “Enola Holmes” movies. The Russos secured another one of their “Avengers” stars, Chris Pratt, along with Michelle Yeoh, Stanley Tucci, Jason Alexander and Brian Cox for the cast. The film was shot in 2022, with additional photography occurring last spring.

As they were readying “The Electric State,” though, came another announcement — during last year’s Marvel Studios panel at San Diego Comic-Con, the Russos were confirmed to return to direct two more “Avengers” films, set for release in 2026 and 2027.

With “Electric State” landing with a thud, the move back to Marvel makes all the more sense, although a source close to Netflix contends that the partnership with AGBO is “really successful,” pointing to the upcoming film “The Whisper Man,” a Robert De Niro-led thriller that begins production next month — although, crucially, the Russos are only producing, not directing.

“Electric State was also the last of the huge tentpole movies made during the streaming wars that were straight to streaming. No one is making such films now, including Netflix,” a top agent told TheWrap.

Earlier this year the Russos admitted that they had grown tired of the studio system following the release of “Endgame.” “We thought, If we don’t escape the system, we’re going to burn out and want to quit. And AGBO reinvigorated us and gave us a lot of opportunities to express ourselves in other ways,” Anthony said.

They had vowed to change the way that audiences watched streaming movies and television series, with multiple parallel narrative paths and ambition that used to only be seen on the big screen — but now they were back at the place that made them blockbuster filmmakers in the first place. But there was one key difference with the Russos’ MCU return. This time, they’d be co-producers through AGBO. A source close to the Russos say that they are “all about collaborations,” pointing to their work with streaming giants like Amazon and Netflix, studios like Disney and filmmakers like the Daniels. “Doomsday” and “Secret Wars” will be no different.

“It just involves more of the infrastructure from AGBO and all the things that we’ve built at the company to help us as filmmakers, the personnel infrastructure, as well as the technological advancements from our innovation team,” Joe said in the same interview.

They might have abandoned their plans to rewrite the rules of streaming and instead retreated to the relative safety of the studio system, but they’re still likely to try and shake things up.

“I don’t know that anything uniquely went wrong with ‘Electric State’ other than the Russo brothers’ vision for it was always huge,” said the agent who spoke to TheWrap. “The underlying property is quite small.”

But the Russo brothers don’t do small.

Umberto Gonzalez contributed to this report.

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