There Is No ‘The Electric State 2,’ But There May, Somehow, Be A Show

The Electric State has proven to be one of the wildest Netflix stories to date, with an A-list cast and pair of directors making what is one of the most expensive movies ever made, arriving with near record-low audience scores, but while being more comfortably received by fans, and attracting a lot of initial viewership, at least.

If a movie does really well, Netflix, or other studios, are prone to announce a sequel or the start of some sort of cinematic universe attached to the project. That doesn’t always work out (where’s the announced Red Notice 2? Where’s promised The Gray Man universe?), it’s still often a goal to expand properties that way.

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So, that may lead to a question about The Electric State 2, but no, that is likely not happening according to the Russo Brothers. But in that same Entertainment Weekly interview, they reveal that the Electric State universe (sigh) may expand in a different way, with a show:

“We love immersive worlds, so we always try to build worlds that have the capability for future storytelling, because that’s what we like,” Joe said. “There is a game currently that’s being released with the movie, and we’re in discussions around a potential show idea that could work for it, but no sequel conversations as of yet.”

This raises a lot of potential questions:

• If the movie cost $320 million for two hours, how much would a show cost? Sure, aspects could be scaled back, but by its nature, it’s a show that requires loads of CG robots, albeit maybe not the expensive A-list cast it had for the film, which no doubt added to that total. But again, how cheap could this really even be to justify the idea?
• What is Netflix’s measure of performance here in terms of viewership? The streamer has no “box office” goals, but no doubt they have internal viewership metric goals. Surely it would need to place on Netflix’s top 10 movies of all time list, by viewership. But with that price, it should be near the top, if not at the top, but I’m not sure how likely that is.
• Does Netflix care at all about its perceived quality? We have seen a lot of splits between low critic scores and high audience scores, but often, critical reception does seem to correlate with show death or sequel-killing. But enough viewership, even with these truly horrific critic scores referencing how it butchered the source material, that could still make a show viable. Maybe.

I personally hated this movie. I would not watch a show. But it’s not really up to me. I do wonder, however, with this sky-high price, good-but-not amazing audience scores and bottomed-out critic reception, if this will actually happen.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.