The Russos are the prodigal sons of Marvel. After overseeing Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, the undeniable high points of the MCU so far, the Russos fled Marvel to spearhead their own movie franchises on streaming. However, after a handful of Marvel movies underperformed, it became clear that Marvel needed to make a big move. So at San Diego Comic-Con, Kevin Feige announced the Russos would return to Marvel to direct Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.
But there’s one more project from the Russos’ Marvel sabbatical left to release: The Electric State, a strange dystopian road trip adventure based on the book by Simon Stålenhag. The movie stars Millie Bobby Brown who has to venture into a ghetto of sentient but sequestered robots in the search for her lost brother. But just how these robots come to be sentient isn’t all that fictional — and makes things a little awkward for the Russos.
In conversation with Den of Geek, Electric State star Stanley Tucci and the Russos discussed the dystopian premise of a defeated robot uprising. Tucci describes seeing Disney animatronics at the 1964 World’s Fair, and Joe Russo reveals it was Disney’s animatronics that turned sentient and sparked a war in the movie’s alternate timeline. “His animatronics became sentient at some point and were commercialized and sold and moved into a service industry role,” Russo said. “People bought them with their very shiny pleasing appearance, and then those sentient robots got angry with us and felt mistreated and that is where the post-war dystopia came from.”
While the idea of the animatronics from Pirates of the Caribbean and It’s a Small World rising up is inherently hilarious, making Disney itself (not some fictionalized version of Disney with a different name) the source of this war is a bit odd now Russos are working for Marvel — one of Disney’s biggest franchises — once again.
“I mean, we didn’t ask them!” Russo said. “While we were coming up with the story, we said, ‘How could you have ended up in this alternate 1990s? What could have changed? Who were the innovators of the time who could have led you here?’” In the world of animatronics and robotics, Disney really was the cutting edge.
Clearly, there’s no bad blood between the Russos and Disney. In fact, being painted as the company innovating this technology is actually a compliment, albeit a strange one, on Disney’s illustrious century-long history.
After all, The Electric State is an alternate-history movie: it shows what could have happened, but thankfully did not. Disney may be dominating the world of franchise movies, but it’s not after world domination.
