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Priyanka Chopra Jonas, robots, Robert Downey Jr., and more were in focus in London Tuesday morning as executives from AGBO, the artist-led independent studio from brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, discussed upcoming series and film projects. Chief creative officer Angela Russo-Otstot, the sister of the duo, and chief marketing officer Marian Koltai-Levine also shared insights into the Citadel franchise and its upcoming extensions and more.
AGBO has been developing tentpole-focused entertainment universes that look to reach global audiences via film, TV, games and virtual world experiences. Via the banner, the Russos. have produced such projects as Oscar best picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once, Amazon’s Citadel, and Netflix’s Extraction movies starring Chris Hemsworth, while directing the likes of Apple’s Tom Holland crime drama Cherry (2021), Netflix action movie The Gray Man (2022), and the upcoming sci-fi adventure The Electric State for Netflix.
The Russo Bros. have also recently agreed to return to Marvel Studios to direct not just one, but the next two Avengers movies. Their sister said on Tuesday that the company has broadened and deepened its bench of executives and creatives over the years, making this return to the Marvel universe more of an organic step than a challenge for AGBO and its future.
“Creatively, what’s really interesting about this moment of coming full circle for them is that they founded AGBO with a lot of wonderful lessons they had learned over the 10 years that they worked at Marvel. And so they carried those lessons into this company and used them as the foundation for the company,” she explained. “Over the last six years or so, the company has grown and evolved, and we’re taking those lessons now and bringing them back to this next venture at Marvel. So, I think, they are best equipped with AGBO as producers because their creative process is so dependent on the collaboration with each of the folks at our company.”
The AGBO execs are in London to meet with the teams behind the upcoming Italian and Indian spin-offs of Amazon hit series Citadel, starring Priyanka Chopra. Season 2 production is taking place in London this fall, with Joe Russo directing. Meanwhile, Citadel: Diana, shot in Italy, will premiere on Oct. 10, while Citadel: Honey Bunny, made in India, debuts on Nov. 7.
And Chopra, along with Karl Urban, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Safia Oakley-Green, and Vedanten Naidoo, also stars in The Bluff, which just finished production in Australia. Set in the 19th-century Caribbean, the feature follows a former female pirate who must protect her family when the mysterious sins of her past catch up to her.
“The story is loosely based on a real-life historical figure, but it’s a female pirate, and it’s a very gritty period [story] and violent and all things that most studios would say no to,” said Russo-Ofstot.
In March, AGBO will be releasing the film The Electric State on Netflix, which the Russo Bros. directed with a cast that includes the likes of Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Stanley Tucci, Jason Alexander, as well as the voices of Brian Cox, Anthony Mackie, Woody Harrelson, Jenny Slate and more. “It’s a wonderfully imaginative alternate history that takes place in the 1990s,” Russo-Otstot said. “It’s based on an illustrated novel by an artist [from Sweden] named Simon Stålenhag,” adapted by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. “They were the writers that did all four of the Marvel movies that Anthony and Joe directed. They work at our company as the co-presidents of story department. Christopher found this book on Facebook in a crowdfunding. And he said, there’s a movie here. And so we optioned the book, and he and Stephen built out a really rich mythology. There was an existing mythology in the book, but they expanded upon it.”
Lauding the “incredible cast,” she called the film “a really interesting exploration of a world where service robots live alongside humans. Within their time performing specific services for humans, the robots start to realize that they may want something more than the purpose they [were made] for, and the humans begin to fear this. So, eventually, a conflict plays out. There’s a war between the humans and the robots, and the humans leverage technology to win, and they take all of the robots and banish them into an exclusion zone in the middle of a desert wasteland in the center of the U.S. But it’s a global conflict as well. So there are other stories and narratives that can play out in different countries around the world, but we witness the U.S. story in this film.”
Koltai-Levine shared on Tuesday that “Chris Pratt’s sidekick is Anthony Mackie, which is a great little irony” for Marvel universe fans.
Russo-Otstot also argued that the movie’s robots “have a real nostalgia to them,” adding that some of them are based on actual brands. Woody Harrelson’s robot character, for instance, is Mr. Peanut in the robot rebellion. And I remember when we had to approach Hormel to ask permission to do this. We were like: ‘It has to be Mr. Peanut. We have to make this work.’ And fortunately, it did work out.”
In early 2022, AGBO got a $400 million investment from Japanese video game maker Nexon Co. in a deal that valued the company at $1.1 billion and gave Nexon a 38 percent stake. The company has also been working on developing a gaming slate, led by former Epic Games chief creative officer Donald Mustard who is now an AGBO partner.
Plus, the company is looking for ways to use its creative and technological capabilities in innovative ways. “I love this opportunity that was brought to us,” Russo-Otstot shared. “Anthony, Joe and Donald separately have all had wonderful collaborations over the years with Robert Downey Jr., and Robert was going to do this play called McNeal, which is in previews and is premiering on Monday night at Lincoln Center.” It sees the star playing a gifted author who always finds himself as runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize and develops a fascination with artificial intelligence.
“Within the play, there’s an exploration of the lead character confronting an AI version of himself. He asked if our tech teams could build out the digital asset that would represent him, and so we used our virtual production team to create a digi double that appears within the play” on a screen, Russo-Otstot explained. “It was a really fun small contribution to this incredible endeavor.”
She emphasized that while the play is about an AI version of the author, AGBO didn’t make an AI version of Downey Jr. or his character, but a digital double.
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