The directors behind two of the biggest movies ever made – “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame” – have high praise for the latest season of “Stranger Things.” Directors Joe Russo and Anthony Russo admitted they’re “huge” fans of the Netflix series while talking to TheWrap at the premiere of their new film “The Gray Man,” adding how impressed they were with the season’s scale.
“Season 4 was out of this world,” Joe Russo told TheWrap (which you can watch in the video above). “It was as big as anything I’ve ever seen.”
Indeed, “Stranger Things” Season 4 was the biggest season of the hit series by far, spanning the globe in terms of locations and stretching the limits of runtime – to the point that every episode ran over an hour long, and the season finale was a feature-length two-and-a-half-hours long.
The praise from the Russo Brothers certainly means a lot, considering “Avengers: Endgame” is one of the biggest and highest-grossing movies ever made, as their MCU-capper boasted a whopping ensemble.
But their “Stranger Things” fandom should come as no surprise to those who’ve been paying attention. The Russo Brothers are next set to direct a film called “The Electric State” starring Millie Bobby Brown.
“We’re about to start work on a movie called ‘The Electric State’ in October starring Millie Bobby Brown,” Joe Russo said. “It’s a movie we’ve been working on for a couple years, we’re very excited about it.”
Set in an alternative future, “Electric State” centers on a teenage girl (Brown) who realizes that a strange but sweet robot has been sent to her by her missing brother. She and the robot set out to find the brother in an imaginative world of humans mixing with robots, uncovering a grand conspiracy in the process.
The film will be produced and distributed by Netflix, just like the Russo brothers’ latest effort, “The Gray Man” which opens in select theaters Friday before debuting on the streaming service on July 22.
“It just screamed cinema, it just felt like it needed to be converted into a movie” Joe Russo said of the action-thriller’s source material, a book written by Mark Greaney.
As for the casting of Ryan Gosling as the film’s protagonist and Chris Evans as the antagonist, Joe Russo pulled back the curtain a bit about why each actor was the right fit.
“Ryan was perfect for the role. He has incredible physicality. He’s a great actor. He can convey a lot with very little. This character needed a rich internal life, he needed to be warm so the audience could get behind him. And he has a very quirky sense of humor, and the movie’s got a very quirky sense of humor.”
Chris Evans, meanwhile, was looking to take risks coming out of the Marvel movies, Joe Russo said, adding: “We thought he’d be perfect playing a sociopath.”
Elijah Gil contributed to this report.