There are a lot of films on the 2025 movie schedule to be excited about but between the upcoming Marvel movies and the first DC movies in James Gunn’s new DCU, there is a strange little upcoming Netflix movie directed by the Russo Brothers that I am perhaps looking forward to absolve all else: The Electric State starring Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown.
It’s a strange little movie that starts off with the idea that Walt Disney’s audio-animatronics eventually gave rise to sentient robots and that those robots eventually went to war with humans. One of the key robot characters in the film will be an animatronic Mr. Peanut. And while that’s wild enough, Joe Russo tells EW that Mr. Peanut will be “the Jimmy Carter” of the robots. He said…
Mr. Peanut is, in a lot of ways, the Atticus Finch or the Jimmy Carter of the robots. He's the most intelligent, the most progressive, the most humane. He has now secreted himself away in an area of the country called the Exclusion Zone, where any of the surviving robots were rounded up and put into [after the war]. It's a large-scale prison that covers several hundred square miles of the American Southwest.
It’s unclear if the joke of making a connection between Mr. Peanut, a sentient peanut, and Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer, is intentional, but I am absolutely here for it. Honestly, considering the work that the Russo Bros. went through to get the rights to use Mr. Peanut as a character, it would make sense if this connection was entirely intentional. They could have used any advertising character, or used an original creation, but they clearly wanted Mr. Peanut.
The other reason what we know about The Electric State makes it interesting film is that while it takes place in a world where a war between robots and humans happened, it’s not actually about the war. The movie is set after the war has already been won, by humanity.
Chris Pratt plays a former fighter in the war dealing with his own issues, who agrees to help Millie Bobby Brown, who believes her brother died in the war, but learns he is still alive and in need of rescue. This will send them into the Exclusion Zone referenced by Joe Russo, that will put them in contact with Mr. Peanut, and other robots.
Pretty soon the Russo Brothers will be back working with Marvel on the two planned Avengers movies, and Chris Pratt may be back there too. Until then, we’ll get to see a very different sort of adventure from them which may not be the best movie of next year but it is shaping up to be one of the strangest and I can’t wait for it.
