The Lessons of M3GAN 2.0
How making something for everyone ends up alienating the people you already had
It’s A Pretty Obvious Design Flaw
Blumhouse and Universal Pictures have collaborated to distribute mainstream horror (or horror adjacent) movies to cinemas many times. In fact, they’ve done so eight times in the last 21 months alone. We can argue about the quality of these releases (The Exorcist: Believer, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Night Swim, Speak No Evil, Wolf Man, The Woman in the Yard, Drop and M3GAN 2.0) but that’s rarely the point. Believer made a lot of money and might be the worst one on the list. To get to the root of what went wrong with M3GAN 2.0 we need to go back to a much earlier collaboration. 2017’s Happy Death Day. Christopher Landon’s clever slasher time loop movie was a surprise smash hit…raking in over 12 times its budget in the US alone. Nearly 28 times its budget worldwide. A sequel was inevitable. That’s where things took an odd turn.
Happy Death Day 2U arrived in 2019 with double the budget and half the interest. It puzzled people how what looked like a surefire franchise immediately saw such massive diminishing returns. The sequel wasn’t as good as the original…but it was still an entertaining enough watch. It was projected to debut at nearly 20 million dollars on its opening weekend. It opened to the tune of less than 10. Although the movie still turned a tidy profit for all involved…it took in barely more than half of the original’s worldwide total. You may have noticed that Happy Death Day 3 hasn’t turned up in theaters in the past 6 years.
Flash forward to 2023 and Blumhouse/Universal has an even bigger surprise hit on their hands. M3GAN, dumped into the notoriously dead period that is the beginning of the year, opens to over 30 million dollars in the US on a 12 million dollar budget. Initial projections had it pegged for around 20 million. It went on to make over 180 million dollars worldwide. A brilliant marketing campaign helped the ready-made horror icon become an overnight sensation. A sequel was inevitable. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
M3GAN 2.0 arrived this past weekend with the same 20-million-dollar projection of the original film. The film was boldly given a summer release date after being rescheduled twice. It bombed. Hard. Taking in barely over 10 million in its opening weekend…one third of the original’s take in January of 2023. If Happy Death Day was un-franchised following what in most ways would be considered a financial success…don’t expect to see a trilogy capper coming for M3GAN anytime soon. Which is a shame…the 3 is already right there in the title.
I Think (They) Did It Again
So, what happened? People liked M3GAN. Aside from a pesky podcast co-host who hasn’t shut up about it in 2 and a half years…there wasn’t a notable amount of blowback against the original film. It was believed that Blumhouse and Universal had found a new franchise specifically because they reached an entirely new audience with their PG-13 film viral marketed to the TikTok generation.
Did that entire generation not have the attention span to care about a property less than two and a half years later? Well…probably…but the issue is bigger than that. Because there is a lesson to be learned about the commercial failure of M3GAN 2.0. The same lesson that Blumhouse and Universal didn’t learn from Happy Death Day 2U. Horror fans will embrace any new way in which you want to tell a horror story. But they do not like it when you turn your back on the genre altogether.
Happy Death Day 2U and M3GAN 2.0 have more in common than stunningly diminishing returns. They’re both sequels to massively successful horror originals that are not, themselves, horror movies. This is where we need to pause and discuss creativity vs. commerce. Both sequels see the director of the original return (albeit without the same screenwriter). To some extent…the paths followed by each must represent at least some creative vision for where they wanted the stories to go. They at least signed off on it enough to return to the director’s chair. I don’t want the takeaway from this article to be that change is bad or that taking bold swings should be frowned upon. We need those swings…especially in mainstream cinema. But you have to stay in the ballpark…or you’re just swinging a stick.
Happy Death Day 2U goes pure sci-fi comedy. Director Christopher Landon (who wrote the sequel…leaving his desire to change direction unquestioned) may have felt he had no choice in the matter. Simply starting the time loops over and presenting another slasher story may have fared better at the box office (horror fans certainly aren’t immune to flocking to the same old same old) but it would have been a tough sell creatively. What more was there to say? What interesting way is there to say it? If they ever figure that out, I’d suggest greenlighting a third movie immediately and marketing it as a return to form. M3GAN 2.0 makes the more egregious choice.
M3GAN 2.0 is an action/sci-fi/comedy through and through. And it was a mistake. I ranted about all this in our review of the film…which isn’t even a bad film…it’s just the wrong one. M3GAN was embraced as a new horror icon immediately. We’ve seen what happens to these characters over the course of a franchise. They’re going to become the star of the story. People will buy tickets to see them do their dirty work. We’ve literally seen it with another killer doll in the Chucky series. The mistake that M3GAN 2.0 makes is simple. They tried to skip some steps.
Recalibrating Response Model
If the M3GAN character eventually forces her way into becoming the hero of the story…so be it. As long as the audience decides that they want her to be. All Blumhouse and Universal and Atomic Monster and whoever else had a hand in M3GAN 2.0 knew going into a sequel is that people liked seeing M3GAN dance and (at least try to) kill people. Well…M3GAN 2.0 manufactures a reason for her to the doll to have another dance scene…but it doesn’t want her to do the other thing so much.
Sure, it has some fun with the idea…playing off the fears survivors of the first film would have re-activating the killer doll. It even gives us an upgraded model to watch tear through a higher body count than the original has. But it misses the point. It flattens the danger in pursuit of merchandising opportunities. It sacrifices the audience it had for the kind of audience it wants. M3GAN 2.0 is happy you liked M3GAN…but it wants you to know that it didn’t.
Not only does a M3GAN babyface turn muddle the story’s own confused messaging…but it betrays what people want in a M3GAN movie. A killer robot doll that dances and sings pop songs. You nailed the formula in one! Why the rush to change it so quickly? More importantly…why the need to control the character’s perception? Telling people something is never going to work as well as letting them come to their own conclusion. Choosing to turn their back on the horror fans that helped make the original a hit, well…it has repercussions. It was true with Happy Death Day even when that creative choice made sense. It’s true with M3GAN 2.0 when the creative choice doesn’t
I go into more details about how upsetting this applecart was a misstep in the film review…but I want to end with a comment about the audience the M3GAN franchise chose to play to. Yes, younger viewers are more fickle than older ones. It may, in part, be to the screen life they’ve been living their whole life. Probably more to do with the over-abundance of media there is to consume these days. Nothing sticks…it’s hard to make a lasting connection they’ll flock back for. But tastes also change much quicker the younger you are. You experience more new things and gravitate towards different ideas more quickly.
Horror fans are the opposite. Have you ever wondered why those box office projections continually overestimate superhero films while they underestimate horror? There’s a simple explanation. Loyalty. They discount loyalty. The young fans who watched The Avengers 13 years ago are full grown adults now. With jobs and relationships…maybe families…they didn’t have back then. Time is a precious resource…and they don’t have enough of it to run to every Marvel movie dropped in theaters after a bunch of reshoots. Horror fans, on the other hand, want to use the time they do have watching horror films. It’s as loyal a fanbase as exists in entertainment.
If Something’s Broke, You Don’t Just Throw It Away
Whether you’ve blown away creative and commercial expectations like Ryan Coogler did with Sinners or nailed a strange marketing campaign like happened with Osgood Perkins Longlegs or find something new to say in a not quite 28 Years Later legacy sequel like Danny Boyle…horror fans will notice. Whether you’ve turned a standard slasher into a time loop mystery or made a killer doll movie with a viral marketing appeal…horror fans will care. When you turn those ideas into something that rejects the passion that vast and undercounted base brought to the table in the first place…you can end up having a very bad weekend.
The simple lesson of M3GAN 2.0 is this: When you have 180 million dollars’ worth of people who like your killer doll movie…don’t be in such a rush to strip it of its identity and repurpose it for mass appeal. The masses aren’t going to show up for a reformed killer doll movie. Don’t mistake broad mainstream horror appeal for actual mainstream acceptance. Horror brought you to the dance…and you decided to leave the one who brought you at home. Probably watching a horror movie.
All is not lost for M3GAN, however. Unlike Happy Death Day’s six years and counting wait for a return…spinoff film SOULM8TE is slated to arrive next January. I recommend any tinkering that needs to take place to restore what 2.0 ran away from and a concerted effort to market it to horror fans this time. But what do I know? I only watched what’s happened twice already to the same production companies and distributors and tried to learn from it. I’m sure they’ll know better. Third time’s the charm, right?
