“M3GAN 2.0” exclusive first look: How a 'very ambitious' sequel boots up a new universe

What would an Avengers-level event set in the M3GAN universe look like? Star Allison Williams and director Gerard Johnstone normally don’t have to think about such questions, except now they have stumbled into their own cinematic universe based around the viral killer robot who slays in more ways than one. Over two years after the 2022 movie from Blumhouse became an instantaneous pop culture femininomenon, fueled by a TikTok-friendly dance, the pair are readying to deliver a sequel next year with M3GAN 2.0, while a separate erotic thriller spinoff, SOULM8TE, about a sex robot gone haywire, is also in the works.

It's the new MCU, a.k.a. M3GAN Cinematic Universe. So, back to the question at hand…

“I am terrified to imagine what that would mean. What is the Thanos equivalent?” Williams, who also served as executive producer on M3GAN and is now more involved as a producer on the sequel, responds to Entertainment Weekly. “Let's just keep going as long as they're interesting and each one has its own story to tell."

“Just jokingly, whenever the producers asked me what I think about a sequel, I've always said M3GAN 3000,” Johnstone says. “M3GAN in a Mad Max universe. I would absolutely line up to see that.”

Related: Everyone's favorite creepy doll is rebooting for a killer sequel in M3GAN 2.0

It all began when filmmaker James Wan (The Conjuring, Insidious) and the folks at his funhouse of horrors, production company Atomic Monster, cooked up the idea for a killer-doll movie. They tapped Akela Cooper, the brilliantly twisted mind behind the campy head-splitting Malignant, to work on the script and Johnstone, the New Zealand-based director of horror-comedy Housebound, to helm. Their monstrous creation was a story about how Gemma (Williams), a roboticist at a high-tech toy company, creates M3GAN, a life-sized A.I.-powered doll designed to be the ultimate child companion, while also coming to terms with being a guardian to her recently orphaned niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). When M3GAN bonds a little too firmly with Cady, malfunctions and sentience lead to entertaining catastrophe.

Williams knew they had something on their hands when the first trailer came out. M3GAN — rendered on screen through a combination of robotics, visual effects, the physical performance of Amie Donald, and the voice performance of Jenna Davis — attacks a guy with the blade from a paper trimmer in that early teaser, but she first does a little dance routine that became so popular online that even the boss of Blumhouse, Jason Blum, dressed up as M3GAN for both Halloween and the film’s premiere. To quote Charlie XCX, she had quite the brat year. “They understood that she's a canonical type, an alpha intense girl, like a Marni,” Williams says, referring to her character from HBO’s Girls. “Then when the movie came out, watching people have so much fun with it and enjoy the experience in a theater, channeling her, using her in memes, learning the dance is just the greatest ever.”

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For Johnstone, it felt like a mixed blessing. “The movie's about the dangers of technology and kids being on their iPads, and here she was, blowing up on TikTok,” he says.

More specifically, the character of M3GAN blew up as a pop culture icon within the queer community, due largely to the overt campiness infused into the horror. Saturday Night Live even made a sketch where Bowen Yang tells guest host Aubrey Plaza, dressed as the A.I. doll, to “work it out, mother!” while Williams makes a cameo. “Every single moment where the culture was embracing M3GAN just helped reinforce that this oddly toned horror movie with a lot of humor and self-awareness from this Kiwi director was on the right track," Williams comments.

Related: M3GAN universe expands with erotic thriller SOULM8TE spinoff

Is it a coincidence that M3GAN 2.0, which is also the name of that SNL sketch, is now being released during LGBTQ Pride Month next year, on June 27, 2025? “I cannot confirm nor deny, but I do know that these things are often taken into consideration,” Williams replies. “But I don’t actually know the answer to that.”

Plot details on the sequel are heavily kept locked away on some encrypted server no doubt, but both Williams and Johnstone acknowledge how they’re having a bit more fun, armed with the knowledge that they were onto something the first go around. Johnstone mentions Wan had “a kernel of an idea” for a sequel, but the concept largely stems from the director’s earlier plans. “I had actually a different idea for the ending of M3GAN, which would've been interesting but probably not as satisfying,” he says. “The good thing about doing a sequel is I got the chance to expand on that idea into a longer narrative. The idea James had fit really well with that. So, it was just a really good marriage of those two things.”

Johnstone arrived at the team's first brainstorming session with his own pseudo-PowerPoint presentation to hash out exactly what worked with M3GAN. Williams remembers those discussions as going even more broad, getting into the nitty gritty of what makes successful sequels in general. “The answer is, it’s really hard because the fan service thing is so tempting,” she says. “It's so tempting to deliver on whatever aspect of it was the stickiest the first time around and just pummel it into the ground the second time.”

They honed in on Gemma as a reluctant parent, the Frankenstein’s monster element, and the real-world parallels around A.I. “It was really important that the sequel is a response to what people really loved about the first movie, but also this evolving conversation and fear that we're having about how A.I. is changing us and changing our children and changing society,” Johnstone says. “In a way, M3GAN is a personification of all of those fears.” He declines to get into further specifics on M3GAN 2.0, but notes, “It is very ambitious. I felt that the story should be bigger and increase in scale and scope, but it's still a minuscule budget [compared to] the Marvel movie scale.”

Related: M3GAN director on inventing killer doll's viral dance: 'It was one of those crazy, sleep-deprived, 3 a.m. thoughts'

At the very least, as seen in EW’s exclusive first-look photos, M3GAN finds a way to return after seemingly meeting her end in the first movie. As Williams puts it, "We couldn't leave our girl out of it." Johnstone confirms the bot is still very much obsessed with Cady, who appears to be taking after her aunt by working on robotics. M3GAN will also get some new looks. “She's a living doll,” Johnstone notes, “and part of the fun of having a doll is being able to play dress-up. We had a couple of looks in the first film, but I wanted 10 different looks for M3GAN. For the sequel, I felt like here's a chance to do that.”

Williams also isn’t one you can trick into revealing story details. Even as she starts to veer down dangerous territory, she always catches herself. “The producer shuts up the actor in my system,” she says. “It’s like a split situation at this point.” The star is also splitting her attention between M3GAN 2.0 and SOULM8TE. EW can exclusively confirm that Williams is involved as an executive producer on the spinoff, which is directed by Kate Dolan (You Are Not My Mother) and written by Rafael Jordan (Salvage Marines), based on a story by Wan and Ingrid Bisu (Malignant).

Set in the same universe, it’s about a man who acquires an android to help him cope with the loss of his wife, only for this robot to pull a Fatal Attraction. SOULM8TE filmed around the same time they shot M3GAN 2.0 with a cast featuring Lily Sullivan (Evil Dead Rise), David Rysdahl (No Exit), and Claudia Doumit (The Boys). Williams watched all the dailies as she was pulling double duty as a lead star of M3GAN 2.0. “To go from a kind of family horror movie, if such a genre exists, into a sort of psychosexual thriller is pretty rad,” she remarks.

Johnstone is so deep into making M3GAN 2.0 that he doesn’t pay too much attention to what’s going on with SOULM8TE. “It's obviously hugely flattering and satisfying to be involved with something that could spawn its own little universe,” he says. “Universal Pictures had its own universe with all of its monster movie characters, so it's not unheard of. It's probably also the fact that we are living in an age where A.I. is so prevalent. There are so many stories to be told.”

Related: Making M3GAN: How everyone's favorite killer robot was brought to life

Now, let's see M3GAN and SOULM8TE fight Thanos.

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