‘M3GAN 2.0’ Team on Revamped Version of The Killer Dancing Robot
At the premiere of his new film M3GAN 2.0, there’s a brief moment when it’s difficult to tell if director Gerard Johnstone is referring to human adolescents or literal monsters when he explains what scares him the most about raising kids. “It’s like this creature that just keeps mutating and evolving, and once you think you’ve mastered how to deal with it, it just changes into something else,” he told The Hollywood Reporter Tuesday night on the movie’s black and pink carpet in New York.
The similarities between the terrors of real-life teen-rearing and trying to control a sentient killer AI robot — “on steroids,” no less, said executive producer Jason Blum — is at the heart of the sequel to the 2023 horror hit M3GAN. “She’s completely unpredictable,” said EP Adam Hendricks about what fans can expect out of a 2.0 version of M3GAN. “M3GAN, for better or worse, is Gemma’s child and what she’s going to be, this movie kind of decides. But for most of the film, Gemma has no idea and is terrified of what M3GAN could do.”
“Teen M3GAN obviously is scary because she can blend easier into society. She’s also grown up, so to speak, and she comes with a lot of sassiness and a lot of teenage baggage,” executive producer James Wan added. “And as we all know, teenagers can be pretty frightening, so to put that into an AI potentially killer robot, you just take it to a whole different level.”
Hitting theaters on June 27, the sequel picks up a couple years after the deadly events of the original film. M3GAN’s creator Gemma (Allison Williams) and her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) are forced to bring the AI back into the world when they are faced with a newer, deadlier and more human-looking robot built and weaponized by the military.
“We’ve already seen she’s taller. She has more skills. She is more powerful. She has more attitude. I have some control over her, but now she has more ego,” Williams teased of the return. “It’s just as hard for Gemma to raise a teenage robot as it is to raise a teenage human. The movie is as much about parenthood as it is about AI regulation, and asks us to contemplate all of these issues as a culture, but it’s packaged in an extremely fun ride.”
Part of how the sequel illustrates M3GAN’s grow up is through giving her more autonomy over her style and wardrobe, with costume designer Jeriana San Juan explaining that she took the pieces that really resonated from M3GAN’s original look, distilled them down and “remixed” them for 2.0: “She sort of represents a retro future I think that people crave, and because M3GAN has evolved mentally and spiritually in all of it, we gave her a little bit more of a sassy, mature look.”
According to M3GAN voice actress Jenna Davis, audiences can also expect the robot to sound a little different as well. “We played a lot with tones and we matured her a little bit, but not to the point where we lost what everybody loved about her. I wanted to make sure that we kept what people loved — her campiness, her sass, her fun, everything they loved so much about the first one,” the actress told THR on the carpet.
With the recalibration of her body, style and voice, audiences should expect some difference in “the way that she dances, the way that she sings,” teased Hendricks. Added Johnstone, “As iconic as that first dance was, you don’t want to see the same trick twice. So we do something a little bit more special here. Let me just hint: She is a robot. She’s going to do a new dance. Maybe she wants to give a little bit of that robot juice.”
While viewers should expect a few noticeable changes, EP Judson Scott noted that puberty — or being downloaded into a newer, better body — won’t completely change M3GAN. “It’s the same M3GAN you love, just bigger, stronger, faster,” he said. “We’re carrying a lot of that tone that she brought to the first film into the second one, but just surrounding her with a bit of a different story, putting her in different situations.”
That different story will see M3GAN face off with a new AI robot, Amelia, who serves as the sequel’s main antagonist.
“We needed a villain that would really make M3GAN kind of look good as a result. It’s a story about families, and you realize that when M3GAN comes into a nurturing family that reflects on her and she does want to redeem herself,” said Johnstone of how the film approaches the two robots differently. “Whereas Amelia, she’s trained by the military, they’re her parents. She doesn’t have a code like M3GAN. She’s really like a black mirror to M3GAN and that extends through everything from the way they look to the way they fight.”
“There’s a lot of fight sequences. It’s like most of the stuff that I’ve been doing is just fight, fight, fight, and also in different costumes,” noted Ivanna Sakhno, who portrays Amelia in the film. “You have dresses, you have a full body suit, regular human clothes. There’s so much. It’s campy and also it’s just fun and it’s bananas, but at the same time, the fight sequences are legitimate.”
Unlike M3GAN in the first film, Amelia is even more human-like, in a way that progresses the creep factor. “Amelia is indistinguishable from humans on sight, but once she starts talking and behaving, you can tell something’s a little off with her. It’s capturing that same uncanny creepiness from the first movie and applying it a little bit further,” said Scott.
And with Amelia taking over the part of robot villain, M3GAN gets to occupy a different role in the film, something that Scott said “felt like the natural next step. I think that’s really the whole central point of the movie now. We were afraid of M3GAN before, she was trying to kill us and now we need to bring her back to save us,” Scott continued. “One of the fun ideas with this second movie that we discovered is that M3GAN’s the concept, M3GAN’s the idea. Less so the genre of movie she was in, more so the character. So we’d be able to take that character, that idea, and place it in a different genre, makes it feel fresh.”
“It would have been really easy for us to repeat ourselves. We could have very easily made M3GAN 1.5. But we just feel like movies, we need to take bigger swings,” said Hendricks. “So even in the idea of doing a sequel, we wanted to make an original movie — bringing this character into a completely new genre, but at the same time making sure there were foundations.”
For Blum, the decision to do a sequel — even in an industry environment where the threat of oversaturation always looms — made sense because of how widely M3GAN resonated following the first film. “All of us involved felt like people were ready for more of her. It doesn’t always feel like that,” he told THR. “The movie continued to do a lot of business after the opening, which always is a sign that it had very good word of mouth. She permeated the culture and that was a reason for us to try and make another movie.”
As for the future of the M3GAN franchise, Williams said she’s absolutely on board for more. “I want to see M3GAN do everything she can do. I am here for the ride,” the star and producer emphasized. “It’s been an incredible pleasure and challenge and passion to be a producer on this movie. I was on the first one, and it was like I doubled the investment of my soul in the second one. These movies are like big group art projects that are filled with all of our passion, and I just feel so lucky to be involved.”
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