M3GAN 2.0
DANCING QUEEN
MEGAN IS BACK, UPGRADED, AND READY TO SLAY. SFX MEETS THE CREATIVES BEHIND THE HORROR ICON’S RETURN
WORDS: JACK SHEPHERD
THERE’S A MOMENT IN THE M3GAN 2.0 trailer when the dancing robotic sensation makes a proclamation. “Hold on to your vaginas,” she warns. How many other horror icons could announce their return with such immortal words?
“At every stage of developing the first movie, the goal was to contribute this icon to the horror lexicon,” Allison Williams, who plays mother Gemma and produces, tells SFX. “She’s a very specific kind of person. Chucky [from the Child’s Play franchise] is this brash, rude, mean, mass murderer in the body of this weird-looking doll, and Annabelle is just still and terrifying. M3GAN has her own vibe going on, and for people to embrace that so quickly, it felt amazing.”
Audiences not only embraced M3GAN, they chiselled her mannequin face into the Mount Rushmore of horror greats. She dominated TikTok for months, was spoofed on Saturday Night Live, the drag queen Jorgeous dressed as her on RuPaul’s Drag Race, and a legion of M3GANs flash-mobbed Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights. Chucky could never.
“I did not think it would become this kind of pop-cultural phenomenon,” says writer and director Gerard Johnstone. “If the sequel’s bigger and bolder, it’s because of the audience’s reaction to the first. To do a movie that was very small didn’t feel like we would be listening to the audience.”
TERMINAT-HER
Development on M3GAN 2.0 began shortly after the huge box-office success of the first, and while Johnstone initially felt some pressure delivering a sequel to an immediately beloved hit, he also saw the follow-up as an opportunity to do something unexpected: recontextualise M3GAN as a hero. In other words, to Terminator 2 "this bitch" (the trailer’s words, not ours).
Feeling blue: M3GAN finds herself with a new body.
Violet McGraw (Cady) and make-up artist Adrien Morot have a close encounter with M3GAN.
“As soon as we were a go for a sequel, it felt like the world was changing rapidly,” he says. “We’re all so influenced by AI; we’re all using it. It felt like, ‘Oh shit, there’s been a sea change here.’ The AI winter is over. Now we have to face the fact that AI is here. Weirdly, that informed the story for M3GAN 2.0. It’s like, ‘If M3GAN’s still alive, maybe she’s not going anywhere. Maybe we need to figure out a way to work alongside this thing. Maybe we can ask ourselves if we gave this robot a fair shot.’”
Johnstone points out that, in the first movie, the robot’s creator, Gemma, is very quick to shut M3GAN down despite her main directive being to protect Gemma’s niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). That’s when M3GAN’s instinct for self-preservation kicks in, leading to her going on a murderous spree, eventually ending with M3GAN being destroyed – or so we thought. The sequel starts with her “consciousness” trapped in an Alexa-type device before being transmitted to a new, upgraded body after a different robot threatens Gemma and Cady.