‘Citadel’ Is Amazon Prime Video’s Response To Marvel’s Exhaustion… Using Its Formula

The idea on which it revolves Citadel (premiering April 28 on Amazon Prime Video) on paper it’s fabulous: a new spy series with new characters that splits into a main series and local spin-offs in different languages ​​that continue the adventure, incorporating new protagonists and that are created and starred by global talents. The raw idea, thus, is from Jen Salke, the head of Amazon Studios and as she released it to the Russo brothers, Joe and Anthony, responsible for four of the main Marvel films: two of the Captain America installments (Winter Soldier and civil war) and the two best Avengers movies to date (Infinity War and end game), not to mention the most ambitious and complex Marvel movies to date (with the permission of Eternals, which is another narrative prodigy, but that’s not why we’re here.) The six-episode first season of the main series, starring Richard Madden and Priankra Chopra Jones, sets the scene: an international spy agency, Citadel, is dismantled by a double-agent who double-crosses them and works for an organization of villains, Manticore (Manticore); two former agents who have lost their memory (and we understand that they survived the carnage) are ‘reactivated’ again by a mysterious character, Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci). Two spin-offs are already on the starting track. The Italian spin-off series, starring Matilda De Angelis, It has just finished filming its first season. And the Indian spin-off series, which will tie closely with Chopra Jonas’ character Nadia and stars Varun Dhawan and Samantha Ruth Prabhu, It is currently in the shooting phase. The spin-offs are based on a main bible, created by David Weil, writer and executive producer of the main series (and creator of another Amazon Prime Video hit, Hunters) that serves as a reference for local teams.

The creative influence goes both ways: as Weil and the American team worked on the main series, they tweaked the story based on input from the teams behind the Italian and Indian spin-offs. The grace and the big bet is that it is not based on a previous intellectual property. The series, which has cost, so far, 300 million dollars, aspires to create a new universe. It’s as if Disney is now turning away from its big franchises to create a new universe. It has worked for Amazon to build on the comics of The Boys and from the films and novels of The Lord of the rings. Now it’s your turn to build your own franchise from scratch. And the series is being proposed just now that there seems to be some fatigue surrounding the Marvel product. And curiously the series applies the Marvel formula. We have already told you that Marvel follows a very precise formula, deciphered by Harvard University. Well, it turns out that Citadel follows her step by step, which is ironic.

First ingredient that copies the formula: Hire directors with experience in areas in which you have no experience. The directors of the series, at least from the first season, have no experience in the spy genre. They come from series like Penny Dreadfulof Life on Mars either Game of Thrones and movies like Gives 5 Bloods either Drive.

Second ingredient: Take advantage of a stable core of professionals. All the stories of the central series and the spin-offs, as we explained to you, have local teams, but they go through the filter of the same team that remains stable (headed by showrunners David Weil and the Russo brothers) that supervises the scripts.

Third ingredient: Do not follow the formula to the letter. Local spin-offs are free to break new ground with respect to the main story (which, as David Weil and the Russo brothers have explained, has already forced to change subplots of the main story of the series) and the series, for what the trailer lets you see, it combines the tone of action in the spy genre with comedy, so it’s not that it takes itself one hundred percent seriously.

Fourth ingredient: Cultivate the viewer’s curiosity. All the details of the series have been kept secret until now, without any leaks about the plot. Beyond India and Italy, it is unknown in which other countries spin-offs will develop. Beyond, of course, that the series-series is successful.