Chris Pratt-Led Movie Gets Netflix Video Game as Streamer Builds Gaming Platform
By Movieguide® Contributor
The Russo brothers’ newest project THE ELECTRIC STATE will receive a prequel video game on Netflix Games only a few days after the movie hits the streamer on March 14.
The game, called “The Electric State: Kid Cosmo,” will help worldbuilding for the movie and plays into Netflix’s plan to use its gaming platform to expand its popular IP. Though the games service was initially launched to provide market-leading games, this has proven more difficult than the streamer first thought.
Last fall, Netflix shut down its studio Team Blue which was focused on creating these high-quality, high-budget games. Instead, Netflix has gone all in on providing shorter games built on TV and movie IP, like THE ELECTRIC STATE.
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THE ELECTRIC STATE, which stars Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt, tells the story of Michelle, an orphaned teenager who travels across the country with her robot Cosmo in search of her younger brother, Chris, after a robot uprising. The prequel video game, described as a “bite-sized adventure puzzle game,” takes place five years before the movie and expands on Michelle and Chris’s relationship. The Russo brothers, who created the movie, believe in Netflix’s gaming strategy and believe it will be crucial to the success of all media in the future.
“It’s something we’re always open to and something we’re always considering,” Anthony Russo told Variety. “But the fact that THE ELECTRIC STATE can be explored though different medium — the type of story that it is and the type of experience that it is, can be explored in different ways — that’s something very important to us as storytellers, because it represents how we like to engage with our favorite material and our favorite stories. So we are exploring many new ways of bringing the experience of THE ELECTRIC STATE to audiences and gamers.”
Russo views the video game as essential for building the universe, as it allows them to expand on Michelle and Chris’ relationship much more than they were able to do during the movie’s two-hour runtime.
“It does get into a part of their relationship that we don’t follow in the film, that kind of predates the film, but also post-dates the film as well,” Russo said. “And the game is able to explore the relationship in more depth. We certainly explore the relationship very thoroughly in the movie, but there’s just a limit in a two-hour medium to how much ground you can cover, in terms of story.”
“So the game does hold something very special in terms of like, who these people are, what their relationship is to one another, and how it evolves and grows over time,” he continued. “And I think people will find it very relatable. It’s a wonderful, complicated brother-sister relationship in everything that that entails.”
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