Brothers Joe and Anthony Russo have made left-field sitcoms, mainstream television dramas, and record-setting superhero movies. There’s barely a major US television network, film studio or streamer the directing-producing duo hasn’t been in business with.
And business has been good for the pair and their Agbo studio. Their Avengers: Endgame is the second-biggest film of all time (fifth, if you adjust for inflation), sitting between the two Avatars. Its predecessor, Avengers: Infinity War, is the sixth.
They were among the first supposedly left-field directors Disney-owned Marvel Studios recruited to its mega-franchise and were given Captain America: Winter Soldier then Captain America: Civil War on the strength of their work on ensemble sitcoms Community and Arrested Development, for which they won an Emmy award for directing.
More recently, they were among the producers of this year’s Best Picture Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once. “We’ve had very, very eclectic careers,” Anthony Russo tells the Listener on a call from Los Angeles. “What Joe and I are excited by is when we can sort of change the format of where we’re working and how we’re working, because it allows us to think about different ways to engage with audiences, different ways we can structure narrative and explore character. It all provides different opportunities for us on a creative side.”
And no, they aren’t bitter that Academy rules meant only three producer names could go on that Oscar and they missed out. “There’s certainly maybe a little bit of that. But we feel very lucky that we were able to play a role in helping create that movie … There’s not a lot of people that could have or would have made that movie with the Daniels [co-directors Kwan and Scheinert]. So, we take a lot of pleasure in the fact that we were able to make a movie like that possible for them. The movie was their movie. As far as awards and all, it really does belong with the Daniels properly. It was a thrill for us.”
Now, the Russos are delivering their biggest-budget production since their Marvel films. But there are no superheroes, it’s not a movie, and it’s not an adaptation of anything else, but a product of Amazon Prime Video’s willingness to spend large on shows with global appeal it hopes will raise its stocks in the streaming business. It’s Citadel, a high-tech, high-gloss, high-action spy thriller. And it’s one where describing it as “international” doesn’t just mean its two multilingual main characters – Mason Kane, played by Scottish actor Richard Madden from Game of Thrones and The Bodyguard, and Nadia Sinh (Bollywood star and former Miss World Priyanka Chopra Jonas) – are rivalling James Bond for frequent-flyer miles.
The show begins with a six-episode English-language first series to be followed by more international iterations – Italian and Indian branches are already under way, their stories connected to the same global battle of spy vs spy.
With a budget of US$300 million for the first series, it’s the second-most-expensive television show made following last year’s debut season of The Lord of the Rings: The Ring of Power, also an Amazon Studios production.
The show was born after studio head Jennifer Salke took the idea of an expansive international thriller to the Russos. The brothers thought of a spy agency with no national allegiances, Citadel, in a battle with an evil rival, Manticore, an organisation developed by the world’s elite to protect their interests.
Committed to other productions, they began as executive producers on Citadel, only to come in as directors and bring in showrunner David Weil after the original writers, Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec, reached an impasse with Amazon, which was underwhelmed by early footage.
The Russos’ reshoots ballooned the budget for an already expensive show. That it’s another mega-budget project for a deep-pocketed streaming platform – just as some are showing sinking subscriber numbers (Disney+), cancelling mid-range shows (Netflix), or rebranding (HBO Max) – has already attracted plenty of speculation.
“It is increasingly obvious the House of Bezos has a fresh calamity on its hands with Citadel,” said the Telegraph last October, based on its steep, US$50 million-per-episode cost and upheavals in the UK-based production. And when the first episode streams at the end of this month, no doubt the spectacular train-wreck scene it features will provide a convenient hook for critics.
But it is spectacular, as is the action. A spy show on superhero steroids? Well, there’s a precedent: the Russos’ Captain America: Winter Soldier took the Marvel character and put him in a Washington DC political espionage thriller.
“Yeah, it certainly echoes back to some of the ideas and themes that we were exploring in that movie, which came from a lot of real-world anxieties that we were having at that time and figuring out a way to channel those into a fictional story,” says Anthony. “Citadel is doing that as well. It’s very much trying to be in tune with a lot of our anxieties of the moment, and figuring out how do we find a fictional exploration of those. Sometimes when you run into real-world political complexities, it can be a little intimidating to people and also fatiguing. This sort of fantasy allows us to deal with ideas that are corollaries but aren’t as triggering in a lot of ways as those real-world anxieties.”
However, Citadel isn’t exactly reinventing the spy genre. Manticore is the show’s equivalent to Marvel’s Hydra or Bond’s nemesis, Spectre. There are shades of Jason Bourne’s amnesiac hitman in one character. There’s a British head villain played with relish by Lesley Manville. Stanley Tucci plays her American spymaster and boffin rival.
“One reason audiences like genre is because there’s a level of familiarity in it,” says Anthony. “You know the rules of the game, then the question becomes how do you then surprise and subvert what the expectations are within that genre and within those rules?
“We have tried to innovate with this show, and I think as you get deeper into the episodes you’ll understand. The show sort of starts off in a more familiar territory and as it evolves it starts to turn on you a bit more in terms of what your expectations are.”
One of the innovations, he says, is having Chopra Jonas as a female co-lead in a genre that doesn’t support a lot of them. The other is Citadel’s multinational approach.
The Italian-American brothers from Cleveland laugh when asked if an Italian offshoot was compulsory.
“It was always on the wish list, let’s put it that way.”
The first Italian series, starring Matilda De Angelis, possibly best known for The Undoing with Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman, has just wrapped filming. Likewise, the Indian series, which will connect to Chopra Jonas’ character, has cast Varun Dhawan and Samantha Ruth Prabhu, both big stars on the subcontinent.
“Everyone we invite into this has an equal level of weight and importance to the story, and I think that’s really unique,” says Joe. “I’m not sure that it’s something we could have done with a theatrical release.”
All the films the brothers have written or directed in recent years – including The Gray Man, Extraction and Extraction 2 for Netflix and Cherry for AppleTV+ – have been for streamers. If the guys with two of the biggest cinema releases of all time aren’t aiming at cinemas, what does that say?
“It was really just the opportunity to have creative freedom in a new space and find a new way to reach audiences and tell stories,” says Anthony Russo. “That was the motivation and the excitement.
“It’s not that we won’t make theatrical features any more. We certainly will.”
With cinematic releases, a film’s box office is a barometer of success. In the streaming world, the numbers aren’t quite so clear, especially with some platforms’ reluctance to divulge viewer numbers.
Don’t they miss the sound of ringing tills? “It is different. But that’s where it gets a little confusing. People like to apply many different metrics to a show to judge its success and it’s hard to really work through those metrics. But for Joe and me, you feel it when an audience appreciates a piece of work when they want to engage with it further.
“In the end, we’ll know whether the show was exciting to people simply from the audience reaction.”
Citadel is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
