It was 1997 when a couple of cash-strapped grad students from Cleveland put out a low-budget film, the black comedy “Pieces.”
No one appreciated it and no one saw it except for one guy, director/producer Steven Soderbergh, who was on the rise and instantly connected with the brothers in Park City, Utah at a local film festival.
Soderbergh would go on to produce their second flick, a crime caper shot in Cleveland, starring George Clooney and William H. Macy, called “Welcome to Collinwood.”
Ron Howard plugged them into the screwball comedy series “Arrested Development,” and then came “Community,” which eventually got them in the door at Marvel Studios when President Kevin Feige saw an episode where the guys deftly blended comedy with action during a paintball shootout scene.
The new “Captain America: Winter Soldier” project needed a director that could thread the needle between superhero fight scenes, meaningful character development and well-timed punchlines; the guys beat out nine other directors to get the job.
The rest is history for Joe and Anthony Russo, who have grossed roughly $7 billion at the box office for Marvel.
But now the brothers are onto their next mega project, this time with Amazon in the sci-fi mini-series saga Citadel.
More than $165 million has been poured into the first seven episodes of the spy thriller, and spin-offs are already in the works despite the fact that Citadel won’t release until January 2022.
The brothers have assembled a team of seasoned creative gurus at their studio, AGBO, to act as gatekeepers to this new universe, and still little is known about the project. However, the level of hype and investment has insiders curious and fans are getting the feeling that something big is on the horizon for two guerrilla filmmakers who simultaneously hail from the underdog rustbelt and the peaks of Tinseltown.
Bloomberg reports:
“Citadel is one of a half-dozen or so universe-creation projects AGBO is developing. Last year, AGBO produced Extraction, an action flick starring Chris Hemsworth that quickly became the most-watched original movie in Netflix’s history. Afterward, the streaming giant commissioned AGBO to begin work on a series of follow-up films. For Universal, AGBO is developing both a movie and a TV series based on the comic The Electric State. For Amazon, in addition to Citadel, they’re making an adaptation of the comic Grimjack.”
It’s one thing for a billionaire to travel to the edge of space, and it’s another thing entirely when a couple of down-to-earth film geeks take viewers into a new frontier that will, at times, feel like home.
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