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Jason Blum is skeptical of folks who claim they know they have a hit while watching the dailies. As far as he’s concerned, it has never happened in his career, even after he smiled the first time he viewed a playback of child actor Amie Donald pirouetting down a hallway and grabbing a machete. It was a darkly funny moment that had just been shot for director Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN, a film which would combine Donald’s movements with Jenna Davis’ vocal performance in order to create the vicious title character. But that this would be the birth of a thoroughly modern horror icon for the 21st century?
Blum didn’t necessarily anticipate that until he saw how audiences reacted to the scene, plus others like it, such as when M3GAN softly croons David Guetta and Sia’s “Titanium” as if it were a lullaby.
“I think if you do [know you have a hit] at the dailies stage, you’re a savant, which I am not,” the producer says with a wry smile. “But I certainly knew the first few times we screened it for an audience we had something really special.” In fact, it’s something that so thoroughly resonated in the zeitgeist, it’s even become cherished in Blum’s own household.
“Little M3GAN is very lovable, and my daughter’s going to be M3GAN for Halloween this year,” Blum says with a not-so-hidden sense of pride. “That’s the first time she’s ever worn a Blumhouse costume, so clearly the movie affected the culture.”
It is perhaps this reason that, like most sequels Blumhouse has produced, the filmmaker is approaching M3GAN 2.0 with the sincerest of care. When he stops by the Den of Geek NYCC studio to discuss the film with us—as well as January’s intriguing Wolf Man remake—it is ahead of a 2025 film slate that includes new Blumhouse Productions originals and sequels. But over the years, he’s come to the careful realization that sequels work best when they retain the original talent that made the earlier films so beloved in the first place.
“I think the most important factor to creating a successful sequel is to have the people who were responsible for the original movie back,” Blum explains. “Hollywood doesn’t do that a lot, but on almost all the sequels we’ve done—not all—but almost all the sequels have the original people back.”
In the case of M3GAN 2.0 that means getting Johnstone back behind the camera in the director’s chair and making sure screenwriter Akela Cooper is once again holding the scripting pen. Furthermore, Allison Williams and Violet McGraw are both back in front of the lens as Gemma and Cady, an aunt and niece who are forced to get a lot closer after Cady’s parents died in a car accident during the first film. And then there is, of course, M3GAN—who we can hope will have more viral TikTok-ready moments in the sequel, right?
“I hope so,” Blum teases. “I would never presume to say we’re going to do it again. It’s very hard. And we’re trying to do something quite different with this second movie, because if you repeat the movie too much, people are disappointed with a sequel… a sequel’s got to be different enough from the first movie that people don’t feel cheated, but not too different from the first movie that people feel cheated, and that’s the line we’re trying to straddle with M3GAN 2, and I think we do that.”
It’s a cagey answer, but Blum does confirm that the first film’s themes about parenting in the 21st century while facing the horrors of new technologies will carry over to 2.0—even as the sequel finally lets us better understand what’s going on in M3GAN’s hardware.
“The second M3GAN, I would say, is similar to [the first],” Blum reveals, “in that it extends on that theme. I don’t think we’re tackling new social issues, but we’re getting deeper into who M3GAN is, what makes her tick, and how lethal she can actually be.”
We have to admit, it would make good business sense for the characters in the sequel to figure out how their homicidal AI robot works before it goes back to market.
M3GAN 2.0 opens June 27, 2025.
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