It's Russover: The Russo Brothers are Anti-Art

When you take a dog for a walk, it will most likely have to use the bathroom at some point during the journey. This is perfectly natural and routine. No one pays much mind to a dog they see taking a poo on the sidewalk. It is for this reason, too, that when on 14 March  2025, Netflix released its own pile of dogs**t entitled The Electric State onto the sidewalk that is its subscriber base; I paid it very little mind. It was just another inordinately expensive Netflix original, a new piece of attention-grabbing ‘content’ in Netflix’s ever-expanding dogs**t emporium. And then I saw who directed it.

To many people, the Russo Brothers are, I imagine, seen as a positive force in the world of film. After all, they were the minds behind two of the biggest blockbusters of all time, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, both of which saw rave reviews and staggering box office numbers. I’ll freely admit that I love those films, and seeing them on opening night was a movie-going experience I might never be able to replicate. Once they began taking their own big swings post-Marvel, however, I think people mostly stopped paying attention. But I didn’t, and what I’ve seen so far is not encouraging — not just for future Russo Brothers projects, but for film as a medium.

I previously wrote an article on what I dubbed the “money sinkhole” of modern Hollywood, discussing how the domination of Big Tech in Hollywood has led to budgets for films and TV shows ballooning out of control. My first example to illustrate this problem was the show Citadel, produced and created by — you guessed it — the Russo Brothers. Combine this with their 2022 film The Gray Man and the aforementioned The Electric State, and you’ll see that the Russo Brothers have created a slate of films which cost as much as eight Oppenheimers (for those curious about the number, it’s $820 million). Unlike Oppenheimer, however, these projects have had an infinitesimally small cultural impact. If you can find me a devout fan of The Gray Man or Citadel, your next pint is on me. 

“But Leo,” you might find yourself asking, “it sounds to me like the Russo Brothers are merely the symptom of a larger problem.” While I don’t remember saying you’re allowed to chime in, you do raise a fair point. I won’t try to claim that the Russo Brothers are, in some way, the driving force behind the Hollywood money sinkhole, but rather that, as filmmakers, they are almost pathologically creatively bankrupt. Time and time again, the Russo Brothers choose to take on projects that seem more focused on creating future lucrative cinematic universes (The Gray Man and Citadel are especially denotative in this regard) than producing genuinely meaningful and impactful art. And, time and time again, they’re paid handsomely for it. 

More than anything, this is just sad to see. The Russo Brothers, before they got involved with Marvel, were primarily sitcom directors, directing episodes of Arrested Development and Community. Two specific episodes of Community, the two-part season two finale ‘A Fistful of Paintballs’ and ‘For a Few Paintballs More’, were so revered that one critic, Alan Sipwell, called them the Godfather Part II of sitcom episodes. These episodes are in the top five highest-rated episodes of Community on IMDB, and they played a big part in Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige’s decision to have the Russo Brothers make MCU films. 

It’s this journey from ‘Fistful of Paintballs’ to the Fistful of Rubbish that is The Electric State that makes me worried for the future. How many other promising young filmmakers will wind up lured into a cycle of cynical content production under the perverse incentives of modern Hollywood? How many will wind up like the Russo Brothers: anti-art hacks whose creative spark has undoubtedly been smothered? Only time will tell. 

Image from Wikimedia Commons