The Electric State and What $320 Million Cannot Buy

Let me get one thing out of the way. The Electric State is not interesting enough to be a true disaster. A real disaster has ambition in it somewhere, a swing that missed. This is something flatter and more depressing: a competent, weightless, focus-grouped product that cost, by the reported figure, around $320 million, and looks like roughly any other thing the same machine could have made for a fifth of that. The catastrophe is not on the screen. It is in the ledger, and in the fact that nobody at Netflix seems to think the ledger is a problem.

Anthony and Joe Russo directed it, from a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the same four-name team that built the back half of the Marvel machine. It is loosely adapted from Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 illustrated novel, which matters, because the source is the most damning evidence in the case. Netflix premiered the film at the Egyptian Theatre on 24 February 2025 and dropped it to streaming on 14 March. By then the only question worth asking was not whether it was good. It was how a book this specific became a film this generic.

What the money erased

Stålenhag’s Electric State is a thin, melancholy thing. A girl and a toy robot cross a dead American west littered with the enormous rusting carcasses of a war nobody won. The book is mostly silence and dread and the particular loneliness of obsolete technology lying in a field. It works because it withholds. You fill the quiet yourself.

The film fills the quiet for you, at volume, for two hours. The dead west becomes a quip delivery system. The robot, Cosmo, is cute. Chris Pratt turns up as a smuggler named Keats doing the exact Chris Pratt the part orders off the menu, and the picture stops every few minutes so somebody can be funny at it. Millie Bobby Brown, as Michelle, is given almost nothing to play except determination, and plays it. The alternate-1990s setting, the human-robot war, Sentre and its chief executive Ethan Skate, the consciousness-uploading Neurocaster, all of it is laid out in expository slabs because a $320 million film cannot afford to be misunderstood by anybody anywhere. The source is a book about silence, and they spent the budget of a space programme drowning it out.

That is the part that should bother anyone who likes movies. The money did not buy fidelity to the thing they paid for the rights to. It bought the erasure of it. Every dollar went toward making the strange book normal.

The budget is the story

Here is the number again, because the number is the story. A reported $320 million. The trade reporting suggests the thing would have cost something nearer $200 million at a conventional studio, and ballooned from there under Netflix’s roof. For scale, that single figure is in the neighbourhood of what several recent Best Picture winners cost combined. It is more than Avengers: Infinity War spent, and the Russos made that one too, with several hundred more moving parts and an actual ending people queued overnight for.

So where did it go? Not to the screen, exactly. The effects are fine. The cast is enormous and expensive, Ke Huy Quan, Woody Harrelson voicing Mr Peanut, Anthony Mackie, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, Giancarlo Esposito, Stanley Tucci, most of them used for a scene or a voice. The truth is duller than waste. The money went where money goes when there is no force in the room pushing back: into a production with no ceiling, no theatrical opening to be humiliated by, and no studio executive whose own job depends on the thing not losing a fortune. Netflix removed the friction, and friction, it turns out, was doing a lot of the work.

A flop that is not allowed to be one

The critics did their bit. Rotten Tomatoes settled at 14 per cent across more than 150 reviews. The New York Times called it obvious, garish and dumb. Metacritic landed at 30. None of that is the interesting failure, because a bad review is a thing a studio can survive and learn from.

What it cannot learn from is the metric Netflix replaced box office with. The Electric State opened at number one on the service’s English-film chart with 25.2 million views, held the top spot a second week, and finished among the most-watched films of the year. By the only scoreboard Netflix shows shareholders, it won. There is no opening weekend to print in red, no second-week collapse to explain, no theatre chain demanding to know why the seats were empty. A $320 million film that critics buried and audiences mostly shrugged at gets folded into a viewership chart and called a hit, and the next one gets greenlit on the same logic.

That is the actual subject here, and it is bigger than one bad movie. The discipline that used to make expensive films at least try to be good was never aesthetic. It was financial. A studio spent that kind of money in public, with its name on the marquee and its quarter on the line, and that exposure is what forced the choices: cut this, focus that, make the spectacle mean something so people leave the house for it. Netflix has engineered all of that exposure away. The money is frictionless, the failure is invisible, and the result is a film with the budget of a blockbuster and the stakes of a screensaver.

What it cost the Russos

The Russos are not hacks. Infinity War is a genuinely hard piece of engineering, dozens of arcs landed in one structure, and they landed it. The Gray Man, their last Netflix cheque at around $200 million, was thin but at least moved. The Electric State is the point where the model they have signed up to starts eating the thing that made them worth hiring. You cannot build tension without limits, and Netflix has abolished the limits. Give a good carpenter infinite lumber and no blueprint and you do not get a cathedral. You get a very large shed.

I do not want them back on the monster-budget treadmill. I want them on a film with a number attached to it small enough to be frightening, where somebody can still say no. The lesson of The Electric State is not that the Russos lost their touch. It is that $320 million, spent where no one is watching the spend, is not a resource. It is an anaesthetic. It buys you the freedom to make something nobody needed, beautifully, and to never once feel the floor.