Jason Blum — Blumhouse founder and CEO — takes responsibility for the failures that “M3GAN 2.0” suffered after a disastrous opening weekend at the box office…
When “M3GAN” was first unleashed into theaters in January 2023, the film about an AI powered robot breaking bad ended up as one of the surprise hits of the year earning over $181 million at the box office on just a $12 million budget.
The success of that film led to Blumhouse immediately ordering a sequel but “M3GAN 2.0” not only failed to live up to its predecessor, but the movie might end up as one of the biggest flops of the year after opening to just $10 million in the U.S. and only $17 million overall worldwide. In a surprising move, Jason Blum — the founder and CEO behind Blumhouse — addressed what went wrong with “M3GAN 2.0” after it appeared that the studio has a bona fide franchise on its hands after the first film became an overnight blockbuster.
“We all thought M3GAN was like Superman—we could do anything to her,” Blum told The Town podcast. “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 overthought how powerful people’s engagement was, really, with her.”
While the first film was rated PG-13, “M3GAN” was definitely a horror movie. Meanwhile, the sequel checked a whole lot of boxes — sci-fi, action, comedy — but none of them really hit on horror whatsoever.
In a move similar to “The Terminator” to “Terminator 2,” the popularity surrounding “M3GAN” convinced the studio to change her from a villain into a hero of sorts much like the transformation Arnold Schwarzenegger had in James Cameron’s epic sci-fi saga. Unfortunately, it seems audiences liked the horror perhaps more than Blumhouse realized and dramatically changing the actual character of “M3GAN” just didn’t appeal with audiences.
“We’ve gone over our skis too far,” Blum explained. “Summer movie, change the genre, set the date. We got too excited by M3GAN, and she didn’t work.”
From a change in genres to moving the release date from January — where there’s far less competition — a summertime slot, there’s a number of factors that probably played a part in “M3GAN 2.0” failing at the box office and Blum admits he’ll never known for certain what exactly led to the movie’s downfall.
But he wanted to address the struggles the film faced head on rather than hiding away like “M3GAN 2.0” just never happened.
“I thought, you know what? If Blumhouse is in a slump, I’d like to tell that story,” Blum said. “I don’t want other people to tell that story, number one. And number two, one of the things that is so annoying about our business, is everyone says, ‘Oh, I learned so much from failure.’ But when they’re actually in a situation where things are not going well, they sweep it under the rug. They pretend it’s not happening.
“We’ll never really know why this movie didn’t work. 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.”
“M3GAN 2.0” struggling to find an audience is another in a series of struggles that Blumhouse has faced at the box office recently. Other films such as “The Woman in the Yard,” “Wolf Man” and “Drop” have also faced a rough go at theaters lately as the studio tries to find its footing again.
The studio still has two major sequels due out later this year that both project to do big business with “The Black Phone 2” dropping in October and then “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” coming in December.
If you want to hear our full review for “M3GAN 2.0” check it out below:
