Horror fans had an idea M3GAN was going to lean into the goofy and surreal aspects of setting a killer doll loose in the world when the trailer showcasing the main character’s slice-and-dice dance number dropped. And while the 2022 original was a hit, and contained the expected gore and body count, it caught on mostly for those campy elements: murderous robots can be a lot of fun, actually!
M3GAN 2.0 is arriving next week, and star and producer Allison Williams explained to the Hollywood Reporter that the success of M3GAN—particularly relating to how much audiences embraced its tone—gave the team much more confidence to go further in M3GAN 2.0.
“We knew that the characters and the tone from the first movie worked, and that definitely gives you a little bit of confidence in terms of not problem solving for those things anymore,” she said. “You’re sort of beyond that, but we weren’t sure about anything else, which is why we tried our very best to perfect all of the newer elements in the movie, including the fact that we were moving into the action genre. That was not even something that we had explicitly set out to do, but it just felt obvious to [director] Gerard [Johnstone, director of both M3GAN movies and screenwriter of M3GAN 2.0] that if there’s a second doll, we are going to be in that genre now. So we let ourselves enjoy that experience.”
Williams’ character, Gemma, is the brainy inventor of M3GAN, and fight scenes are not her natural setting. However, as Williams teased, that’s part of what makes M3GAN 2.0‘s comedy elements work so well.
“There’s this meta humor to the idea of Gemma suddenly being in an action movie. It’s ridiculous in a hopefully fun way, and we had a lot of fun finding the humor in the mere fact of it while it was happening. It’s as unbelievable and as random a series of events for Gemma as it is for an audience watching the movie,” she said.
To make it believable, Williams had to make sure Gemma seemed to be taking the ridiculous circumstances she finds herself in as seriously as possible.
“When I am in scenes with M3GAN … if I’m at all winking at this hilarious ride we’re on and the camp of it all, it doesn’t work anymore. So I was completely aware of the fact that the only successful version of this movie is one where we’re all just fully committed to this world and its stakes, and the execution of all of that is everything,” she said. “The characters themselves can’t believe that they’re finding this to be their milieu, and they’re just going to make the best of it.”
M3GAN 2.0 opens June 27.
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