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Home / Ke Huy Quan, Anthony Mackie, and More Join the Russo Brothers’ The Electric State
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Ke Huy Quan, Anthony Mackie, and More Join the Russo Brothers’ The Electric State

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Published on November 2, 2022

Screenshot: Marvel / Disney+
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier "New World Order"
Screenshot: Marvel / Disney+

Joe and Anthony Russo’s The Electric State has been in the works for some time—it’s been two years since Millie Bobby Brown was announced as the film’s star—and the cast just keeps getting better. The Netflix movie is based on an illustrated novel by Simon Stålenhag, and follows a girl (Brown) as she makes her way across an alternate America in which humans and robots have been at war.

Chris Pratt, Stanley Tucci, and Jason Alexander are already on board, but today’s announcement from Variety brings a whole ‘nother round of intriguing additions: Giancarlo Esposito (The Mandalorian), Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Anthony Mackie (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, pictured above), and Billy Bob Thornton (Fargo).

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Mackie and Thorton will both voice robot characters; Mackie’s robot hangs out with Chris Pratt’s smuggler character, while Thorton’s plays a role in the robot/human civil war. Esposito’s character, the Marshall, pilots a hunter drone, and Quan plays a doctor (a role that originally went to Michelle Yeoh, who had a scheduling conflict).

The summary of Stålenhag’s book says:

In late 1997, a runaway teenager and her small yellow toy robot travel west through a strange American landscape where the ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside, along with the discarded trash of a high-tech consumerist society addicted to a virtual-reality system. As they approach the edge of the continent, the world outside the car window seems to unravel at an ever faster pace, as if somewhere beyond the horizon, the hollow core of civilization has finally caved in.

The book was originally funded via Kickstarter, which is where screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely came across it. According to Variety, they “adapted its skeletal narrative into a sci-fi adventure. AGBO approached the project with the potential to develop other spin-offs set within its larger world.” (AGBO is the Russo brothers’ production company.)

No premiere date has been announced.

About the Author

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Molly Templeton

Author

Molly Templeton has been a bookseller, an alt-weekly editor, and assistant managing editor of Tor.com, among other things. She now lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods.
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