It was a surprising revelation from The Hollywood Reporter back in September 2022, which revealed that Citadel's production budget had ballooned to north of $200M. However, once you fully understand the Amazon series' incredibly ambitious plans, it makes a little more sense.
The series follows the agents of Citadel, a spy organization with no allegiance to any particular country, and how the organization was ultimately destroyed at the hands of a shadowy, rival spy organization called Manticore.
The battle between Citadel and Manticore plays out over the course of 8 years but the show actually starts at the end and jumps back and forth in the timeline, slowly unraveling the mystery of how Citadel fell. "The show jumps between timelines and the more you dig, the more you find out about these people, the more that unravels," said Madden the Game of Thrones and Eternals star.
Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra star as Citadel agents who had their memories wiped and are living separate, ordinary lives until they're pulled back into the international espionage scene. However, there are also 4 international spinoffs (set in Italy, Spain, India, and Mexico) that will all tell an interconnected story that ties into the main plot of the show.
Chopra will pull double duty and lead both the main North American show and the India spinoff. "It kind of blew my mind. This is something that’s never been attempted on television before, and just the social experiment and the audacity of it was just so exciting to me," said The Matrix Resurrections star.
The first season of the six-episode main Citadel series has wrapped, as well as the Italian spinoff, which will star Matilda De Angelis. The Indian spinoff, which will star Varun Dhawan and Samantha Ruth Prabhu, is currently in production.
Amazon is obviously banking on the diverse cast to make the show and its spinoffs a massive hit. While discussing the show's high ambitions, Joe Russo stated, "It’s been a really delicate but lovely process, and one of the more rewarding of our careers because of the ambition of it. This show has given us the ability to build a new family around the world to tell a giant story in a way that has never been told before.”