Millie Bobby Brown in The Electric State: Bestselling Novel Adaptation and Premiere Insights

While we wait for Netflix’s most eagerly-awaited season, The Stranger Things, Millie Bobby Brown is here to give a little entertainment before that. 

We can’t wait to see Millie Bobby Brown in The Electric State which just had a private premiere recently at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, California. The premiere took place on February 24, 2025, according to People magazine.  

The plot

As the novel talks about Michelle (played by Millie Bobby Brown), a teenager who travels in search of her lost brother Christopher (played by Woody Norman), the film follows the same storyline. 

The promotions revealed that she travels with a man named Keats (played by Chris Pratt) and continues her search with him. The background scenes show that there is a clear war between man and machines, which the co-writer Stephen McFeely clarified is an ‘AI war’, as per Games Radar.  

The trailer was released on October 17, 2024. Watch it here:

The Electric State graphic novel

The movie is based on the best-selling titular novel with graphic illustrations, authored by Simon Stalenhag. The novel already has an impressive Goodreads rating of 4.42. 

The novel’s settings are in late 1997, while the movie shows the mid-1990s. The novel unfolds the plot of a teenage girl who embarks on a quest to find her lost brother. She has her small yellow toy robot while traveling in a “strange American landscape”.

The ruins of technological worlds are shown with details like discarded trash, close to a virtual-reality consumerist society. After having traveled far, they reach the edge of the continent where they see the world running faster than ever. 

There have been outstanding reviews from readers about the novel, and one of them says,   

“This book is a piece of art! Literally. It’s like nothing I’ve ever read before.”

Readers justified in their reviews why the novel deserves all five stars as it is rich in photorealistic details. Still, the writer leaves some of the elements to the readers’ imagination.

How the writers and directors created a backstory

The directors, Russo brothers (Anthony and Joe Russo, directors of Avengers: End Game and Captain America: Civil War) and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely loved Stalenhag’s story, as rightfully claimed by the Goodreads’ reviews. 

They wanted to make more of it. They created a prologue so that viewers get to know how the 90’s US became a dystopia due to the war between humans and technology. The details from the original novel were implied and created into some of the original versions conceived by the co-writers themselves.

McFeely explained, 

“There’s a before and an after for both narrative purposes and world-building purposes.”

He went on to reveal that their version of AI war is slightly different from that of Stalenhag’s. However, it was necessary so that their version of AI war could be portrayed as a war among the robots, which was sometimes “implied and sometimes taken straight out of his work,” interpreted McFeely. 

The trailer has already given hints at the events leading up to the chaos, such as the car being thrown at a building and robots under attack. It would be interesting to watch how the conflict was actually created with more concrete minutiae.

So, we would be seeing Michelle and her younger brother before the war at the beginning of the movie rather than Michelle already on her journey. The movie would move on to present Michelle’s story as an orphan in American foster care where technology is in control of Ethan Skate (portrayed by Stanley Tucci). He has spread AI bots all over the country.

This also suggests that the backstory would let us get familiar with other characters in more depth, such as Ethan Skate. His tech billionaire kingdom might be intriguing, and this is why the movie is injected with a heavy budget of $320 million.

What happens next, you will have to watch after its premiere on Netflix. Mark your calendars!

At the private premiere, the directors told that the most important element that they worked on in the movie was staying true to the theme of technology, as portrayed in the novel. Since the film is PG-13, it was a huge factor in connecting the movie with Gen-Z kids of today.

This generation is directly impacted by technology and is living in tech-risky times, the directors elucidated. That is why they wanted these kids to watch the movie, which gives the film a family appeal. 

Despite the core story of the film revolving around Michelle’s quest for her brother, the sci-fi backstory would be a good way of understanding how things work out, giving the viewers a magnifying glass for digging deeper into the sci-fi world. 

Working experience of Millie Bobby Brown in The Electric State with the Russo Brothers

At the private premier of The Electric State, Millie Bobby Brown did not hold back from showing her excitement when she first visited the Marvel movie sets with her father to see how the Russo Brothers work. It was a “wonderful experience” for her and she wished at that time to be directed by them.

She was extremely thrilled that she had finally made it. It is the same “kickoff” that created a collaboration between her and the directors, and that is how they would work together in the future if again given a chance.

When asked if she would like to work on the MCU project if an opportunity popped up, she responded positively, but only after reading the script. 

How was it working with Chris Pratt?

Millie Bobby Brown was ecstatic while working with Chris Pratt, as cited by WION. She told that she had a hard time staying serious for the scenes as they both are equally “silly”.

They went along really well and looked as if they were always in the mood for a hangout. Their inner child was crazy when they both were together, she confessed, which was later corroborated by Pratt himself.

Pratt opened up about how he had a great time with Brown. Most of the time, they both were doing something “really fun and light while also being dramatic,” he admitted. It seemed as if they had the “freedom to be silly”.   

Genre: Action, adventure, urban adventure, quest, science fiction, dystopian sci-fi, artificial intelligence 

Cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Patt, Woody Norman, Stanley Tucci, Ke Huy Quan, Jason Alexander, Giancarlo Esposito, Anthony Mackie, Woody Harrelson, and Brian Cox

Directors: Anthony and Joe Russo

Writers: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Producers: Russo Brothers production company ‘AGBO’, Mike Larocca, Chris Castaldi, Patrick Newall 

Release date on Netflix: March 14, 2025

Movie runtime: 2 hours 8 minutes

What are you most excited to see in The Electric State?