Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown “breaks your heart” in her sci-fi Netflix movie The Electric State, says co-director Joe Russo

Millie Bobby Brown first won our hearts by playing Eleven in Netflix’s Stranger Things, but for her next movie, The Electric State, it looks like she’ll be breaking them too. 

Following Damsel and Enola Holmes 1 and 2, Brown is back at Netflix for a new dystopian sci-fi adventure where a young woman named Michelle looks for her brother in an alternate world that was once ravaged by a robot uprising.  

Brown plays the lead in The Electric State and she’s joined by Marvel stars Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Stanley Tucci, and Anthony Mackie, as well as Woody Harrelson, Brian Cox, and more who lend their voices to robots that Michelle encounters along the way.

Speaking with GamesRadar+ at MCM Comic Con 2024, The Electric State co-director Joe Russo spoke about the “very emotional” journey Brown takes us on in his next movie directed alongside his brother, Anthony Russo (Avengers: Endgame, Avengers: Infinity War).

“Millie’s carrying a very, very big movie on her shoulders. She’s one of the most watchable and charismatic actors of her generation, and so she made our lives very easy. She makes the story a hell of a lot of fun to watch, and she breaks your heart at several points in the film.”

Expect to fall in love with Brown’s new character, Michelle, just like we all fell in love with Eleven and Enola Holmes, too. 

“We adore her,” added Russo. “We love working with her. We just got back from her wedding two weeks ago, so we’re all very close. In fact, we knew her for years before we cast her in the movie.”

The Electric State was first announced in December 2017 when the Russo Brothers acquired the rights to the graphic novel of the same name. With longtime collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (who they’re next working with on Avengers: Doomsday), Joe and Anthony developed their own spin on the source material, expanding on the dystopian world Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag originally created.

“This book is a loose narrative,” explained Joe. “It’s largely imagery based, but there’s storytelling in the imagery… We ideated in it and came up with a world that we built out around the images of the book. 80% of what you see in the movie is new… There are these certain robot characters and VR devices that are from the book, so there’s some strong elements from it, but a lot of it’s been created out of whole cloth.”

As Joe explains, adapting graphic novels in the world of Marvel is a very different kind of experience.

“You’re talking about decades of comic books with a lot of mythology when it comes to superheroes. When we do our Marvel work, it’s based on our memories of how we felt about those characters, rather than the literal interpretations of them, because they’ve all been interpreted by 50 different writers, 50 different artists, so we try to just tap into the essence of what we liked about the character.”

Get ready to like and even love a whole new cast of characters when The Electric State arrives via Netflix on March 14, 2025. Just be prepared to get your heart broken. 

For even more, fill out your watchlist with our guide to the best Netflix movies to stream now.