Remember when M3GAN danced her way to $180 million worldwide in 2023? It felt like Blumhouse had a brand-new, surefire horror franchise on their hands. A sequel, M3GAN 2.0, was quickly greenlit, and a universe-expanding spinoff called SOULM8TE (still set for January 2026) was ordered. The killer doll’s future looked incredibly bright!
But then… M3GAN 2.0 hit theaters, and it crashed and burned. The sequel pulled in a dismal $10.2 million on its opening weekend, a far cry from its predecessor’s impressive $30.4 million debut. Clearly, something went very, very wrong. But what exactly happened?
“We Thought M3GAN Was Like Superman”
In a surprisingly honest post-mortem interview on The Town podcast, Jason Blum shared his thoughts on M3GAN 2.0‘s box office failure. Blumhouse had initially expected the film to open with upwards of $45 million. That projection steadily plummeted as time went on, leaving the movie with a fraction of those early hopes.
Blum admitted, “We all thought M3GAN was like Superman. We could do anything to her. We could change genres. We could put her in the summer. We could make her look different. We could turn her from a bad guy into a good guy. And we kind of classically over thought how powerful people’s engagement was really with her.”
Action Over Horror? And Too Much Competition?
That “overthinking” seemingly led to Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 taking a Terminator 2 approach. The budget was ramped up, the action spectacle intensified, and the killer doll from the first movie was transformed into something of an action hero. It seems this genre swap from horror to sci-fi/action is at least partly to blame for the movie’s failure to connect with audiences.
Blumhouse’s summer release strategy also appears to have backfired. M3GAN 2.0 wasn’t just battling a new adversary in the film; it was up against behemoth summer blockbusters like F1: The Movie and Jurassic World Rebirth.
Another possible explanation? Perhaps the horror market is currently oversaturated. M3GAN 2.0 found itself sandwiched between 28 Years Later and the aforementioned Jurassic World Rebirth.
“Right now I do [think there’s too much horror in the marketplace],” Jason Blum noted in his interview.
He continued, “I think we’re used to a market that can absorb 12 to 15 horror movies where you get these singles and doubles. I think that’s gone. Maybe it might come back, who knows. But for right now, I don’t think the market can absorb as much horror as there is for sure.”
Could there ever be too much horror? I don’t believe so. Maybe M3GAN was just a one-hit wonder. Or perhaps it’s not a genre problem, but a subgenre problem, an AI problem. There are nearly a dozen AI movies that have been or will be released this year, from Subservience to Companion. It’s not exactly horror’s strongest genre, and to be honest, they all kind of tell the same story: AI goes bad, people die.
Learning from the Risk
Ultimately, Blum admits, “We’ll never really know why this movie didn’t work.” But he also offered a silver lining: “Even if the financial results are not there we took a shot, right? We said, can we take this horror movie and turn it into a crazy sci-fi action, whatever. And I think there’s so much pressure on originals and there’s so many fewer originals that what I hope M3GAN does is it doesn’t discourage other people who make sequels to now make them too close to the first. I think there’s some sequels that are very different and that do work. This one didn’t have to to be, but we took a creative risk and I really hope that people continue to take creative risks within the walls of their franchises, otherwise the movies will feel all the same.”
It seems Blumhouse is taking the lessons from M3GAN 2.0‘s stumble in stride, even if it was a painful one. What do you think went wrong?
