The Electric State has crowned Millie Bobby Brown as cinema’s first ‘Stream Queen’ – for better or worse

Is Millie Bobby Brown in trouble? Watch The Electric State, Netflix’s mindblowingly expensive new sci-fi blockbuster, and you might think so. The 21-year-old Stranger Things star fronts the film alongside Marvel’s Chris Pratt, and it’s nothing short of awful: a soulless, derivative farrago with two ciphers drifting around a barren plot. In a one-star review, The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey described The Electric State as “punishingly obvious and completely incoherent”; most other critics have concurred.

The film is the latest in a run of lacklustre films Brown has produced and starred in for the streamer – the others being Sherlock re-hashes Enola Holmes and Enola Holmes 2, and the creaky fantasy thriller Damsel. While many young actors who found fame on Netflix (Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega; Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey; several of Brown’s Stranger Things co-stars) have leveraged their streaming success to launch buzzy careers in theatrically released films, Brown has starred in just two: the middling kaiju blockbusters Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Godzilla vs Kong (2021). But while Brown’s commitment to making straight-to-streaming slop has done little to boost her credentials as a heavyweight actor, she has somehow built her own kind of stardom. She has a massive following – 64 million people on Instagram alone – and is, undeniably, a draw for viewers. Damsel is said to have clocked 143 million views last year, a figure that would make it one of the year’s most-watched films. For better or worse, Brown is rapidly becoming cinema’s first ever Stream Queen.

Historically, actors were often segregated by medium, as movie stars or TV actors; many of the very best TV performers (Dennis Franz; Kelsey Grammer) struggled to make an impact on the big screen. When you did make the leap successfully – George Clooney making it big after ER, for instance – you didn’t look back. In recent years, however, as the money and creative prestige migrated to television, the line between movie stars and TV actors has become more porous, and it was into this amorphous environment that streaming was born – meaning that there’s never really been such a thing as a “streaming actor”. Until Brown, that is.

There are parallels between her and Pratt, whose turn as a jaded war vet in The Electric State is the latest in a long run of shlocky and unedifying parts for the former Parks and Recreation funnyman. Pratt has lent his insouciant, wisecracking persona to big-screen blockbusters such as Jurassic World, Guardians of the Galaxy and The Magnificent Seven, only occasionally dipping into direct-to-streaming projects such as The Tomorrow War. He is a perfectly good actor on his day, but seems magnetised to mediocrity, picking only projects that bring out his blandest and most irritating qualities. Brown is still in the early days of her career, but it’s already shaping up in a kind of similar pattern: films with big budgets but little imagination; not substantive art, or engrossing entertainment, but meretricious, short-shelf-life content.

It’s telling, perhaps, that Brown seems to have little enthusiasm for cinema. She has previously caught flak for suggesting in interviews that she struggles to engage with films, telling The Sun: “I don’t watch movies. People say, ‘You should definitely watch this movie, it would change your life. And I’m like, ‘How long do I have to sit there for? Because my brain and I don’t even like sitting for my own movies.” This is a markedly different attitude to some of her contemporaries – but does make her a particularly apt poster child for Netflix, a company whose own attitude to cinema as an artform has come under a fair share of criticism. The streamer, which controversially refuses to give its films wide theatrical releases, has become renowned for producing expensive content of dubious artistic quality; reports have claimed that Netflix productions are designed to facilitate viewers watching while using their phones, only half paying attention. They are making movies, in a sense, for people exactly like Brown.

Brown shouldn’t be held responsible for Netflix’s creativity-flattening production model, but it’s noteworthy just how snugly her career fits into this new mode of filmmaking. Netflix doesn’t seem to be a stepping stone, a diversion or a reluctant payday, but her artistic calling. And, within the limitations of just what streaming stardom can bring, Brown has done very well for herself.

Lost too in the dismal reviews of films such as The Electric State is just how unusually well Brown has been able to transition from child stardom to adult acting. Hollywood is littered with child stars who have struggled to make it as adults; Brown seems to have only grown in profile. Whether she would be able to replicate her streaming popularity at the box office is unclear, though – the Godzilla films were hits, but Brown was never really the face of them. The fact that Netflix’s films largely find an audience regardless of critical reception – The Electric State is bad, but hardly an outlier when it comes to damning reviews – has also insulated Brown’s acting from any meaningfully damaging scrutiny. (Much of the discourse surrounding her fixates on the – admittedly reprehensible – criticism she has received for her appearance, and the sexualisation she received from a young age by the media.) Her acting is almost an afterthought. Is she a stiff, limited performer, or is it just the material she’s working with? There’s no way to be sure at this point.

The most important thing Brown has on her side is time: she is still young. People have built great careers from shoddier foundations before. But it’s up to her. Unless she steers her way out of the churn of streaming content, it’s going to be what defines her: an A-list movie star for an age when “movies” have been warped into something else entirely.

‘The Electric State’ is streaming now on Netflix