Blumhouse Founder Jason Blum Says The Biggest Mistake Made With Failed ‘M3GAN 2.0’ Was Treating The Doll Like Superman
Blumhouse didn’t start the year well with Wolf Man and M3GAN 2.0 is unfortunately continuing that trend. The sequel shifted tone, genre, and was overconfidently placed in a summer release window. The result is an opening weekend performance well below expectations at $10 million.
RELATED: ‘M3GAN 2.0’ Review — Is It Summer’s Salvation Or Its Judgement Day?
Producer Jason Blum is taking the loss hard, but won’t do so silently. “I’ve been in pain all weekend long, and I’ve been thinking about all this stuff way too much,” he tells Matthew Belloni on his The Town podcast via EW. “I thought, ‘You know what? If Blumhouse is in a slump, I’d like to tell that story. I don’t want other people to tell that story.'”
Blum has thought about it and identified three reasons why M3GAN 2.0 failed. Number one, he tried to make it a summer franchise rivaling a superhero IP. Said Blum, “we all thought M3GAN was like Superman. We could do anything to her. 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 over-thought how powerful people’s engagement was really with her.”
RELATED: Blumhouse Sets Sights On ‘My Bloody Valentine’ For Next Reboot
Mistake number two may boil down to delusions of grandeur as Blumhouse thought M3GAN 2.0 could be a tentpole. However, it opened against a summer movie with a regular template of star power and fast cars, F1, and got left in the dust. Blum thought he could go “from a little horror movie to a tent pole” and “live in the summer.” He was wrong and could have spared himself embarrassment by releasing in January again.
Third, he wishes he gave the director more time. Gerard Johnstone, Blum explained, is “a terrific director… who couldn’t solve almost anything you throw at him.” He continued, “On this, again, we got over our skis too far – summer movie, change the genre, set the date. You know, and we got too excited. We got too excited by M3GAN, and you know, she didn’t work. So that’s what happened.”
Any chance a sequel to 2.0 had is probably dashed like dinner, but Hollywood doesn’t work like it used to. A spinoff, however, is powering up. SOULM8TE, which M3GAN co-producer James Wan describes as AI meets Fatal Attraction, is due out at the start of next year.
“M3GAN, obviously, dabbles in the PG-13 world, the younger demographic. We always felt like there might be a more adult story to tell, and that’s really what SOULM8TE is,” Wan explained to EW. “SOULM8TE is basically set in the same AI world but seen through a more grown-up perspective, one that embraces all the great erotic thrillers from the ’90s. It’s like Fatal Attraction but with robots.”
NEXT: ‘M3gan’ Review – Outrageously Fun PG-13 Horror
More About:Movie News