M3GAN 2.0: AI Horror Sequel Shifts to Action-Packed Sci-Fi

M3gan 2.0 is a fun upgrade that's a little too self-aware

Charles Pulliam-Moore is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years. Universal and Blumhouse's first M3gan feature came out of nowhere with a premise so ridiculous and campy that it was hard not to be at least a little intrigued. Equal parts Child's Play and Small Wonder, M3gan was undeniably silly with its story about an AI-powered doll who sang Sia's "Titanium" and danced around as she chopped people's heads off. But the movie struck a near-perfect balance between straight horror and comedy that made it a delight to see in a crowded theater. M3gan also killed at the box office, to the tune of $180 million against a modest $12 million budget. That made it all too easy for Universal to greenlight and fast-track a bigger, more expensive sequel, but it was unclear where, exactly, the new franchise might go next. There's a pointed cleverness to the way returning director Gerard Johnstone and writer Akela Cooper evolve their murderous doll's story with M3gan 2.0. And you can see in the film's action-forward sci-fi turn how much more money was put into its production. Like many horror sequels, though, M3gan 2.0 has a tough time living up to its predecessor as it brings back the original cast to take on a few new AI threats. It's by no means a terrible movie, but it does get a bit too caught up trying to wax philosophic about the dangers of a robot uprising when it should be more focused on being a scary good time. Though most of the world has moved on two years after M3gan's (voiced by Jenna Davis, and physically portrayed by Amie Donald) first killing spree, memories of what happened still haunt teenager Cady (Violet McGraw) and her roboticist-turned-author aunt Gemma (Allison Williams). While Gemma's involvement in M3gan's creation tarnished her reputation as an inventor, she's become a well-known advocate for stronger controls on artificial intelligence. At Gemma's new foundation, her longtime friends Tess (Jen Van Epps) and Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) now work to develop different kinds of technologies, like powered exoskeletons that are meant to help humans stay competitive as simple, efficient robots become a larger part of the labor market. The last thing Gemma -- who insists on minimal screen time in their new house -- wants is for Cady to follow in her STEM footsteps. But Cady has a knack for programming things in her own right, and she's very good about keeping it all hidden. Like Gemma, Cady's still very traumatized by her last experience with M3gan. She knows how quickly M3gan's hard-coded imperative to love her can turn violent. Cady wouldn't dream of trying to bring M3gan, who was destroyed, back "better." But the same can't be said for certain people within the US military. Though most everyone remembers how much of a disaster M3gan was, technically speaking, the remote-controlled Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android known as "Amelia" (Ivanna Sakhno) is a different kind of machine. Amelia's got all of her older sister's same bells, whistles, and killing skills, but none of M3gan's buggy, emotional code. Amelia seems like she's the next generation of unmanned warfare right up until the point when she goes rogue and starts murdering people her handlers don't mean for her to. Whereas the first M3gan was a fairly straightforward horror flick, 2.0 switches things up by leading with a strong sci-fi energy that feels like a cross between Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Alita: Battle Angel. Amelia isn't from the future, but she is very much a terminator who snaps necks and kicks people's jaws off with a cold brutality that feels more vicious than the first M3gan's kills. Despite their gore, Amelia's action sequences are delightfully electric and fun to watch as she sets off on a hunt to find innovators in the AI field. But they often lack a suspenseful quality because of how most of her victims don't have any reliable way of defending themselves. M3gan 2.0 seems to know that there's only so much killer-robot-on-human violence one can watch before the schtick gets a bit boring, and so it telegraphs Amelia and M3gan's showdown basically from the jump. Because the film has to bring M3gan back and can't rush headlong into the machines' confrontation, though, it spends a fair amount of its runtime trying to pad Gemma and Cady's arc out with milquetoast ideas about parenthood in the age of AI. Once M3gan's back and in an uneasy alliance with the humans, the story becomes heavy-handed in its messaging about the emotional rifts that technology can cause within family units. Those beats -- many of which play like direct comments on the proliferation of generative AI in the real world -- might work a bit better if the movie's human characters didn't feel so stiff. But the most compelling performance here comes from Davis, who played M3gan as a slightly more sophisticated, complicated version of herself. While M3gan 2.0 has its moments, the original's novelty feels lacking here because of how preoccupied it is with aping elements of bigger, blockbuster-type sci-fi features. And despite the increased scale and ambition -- and the 2.0 in the title -- the sequel doesn't end up feeling like much of an upgrade. M3gan 2.0 also stars Aristotle Athari, Timm Sharp, and Jemaine Clement. The movie is in theaters now.

M3gan 2.0 film review -- AI horror doll gets a witty upgrade and a lethal foil

At the end of November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that quickly announced we were living in a new age. A week later, Universal Pictures gave the world M3gan, a comedy horror with a wickedly timely premise: an AI housed in a humanoid Valley Girl doll, made as a best friend for a lonely child. What could possibly go wrong? For the wider world after ChatGPT, that question is still under review. In M3gan, the answer was: a lot. Not for the producers, though, who spent $12mn on a movie that made back $181mn. And so we now have M3gan 2.0, among the more inevitable sequels in film history. Less predictable is that it is actually very good fun. Writer-director Gerard Johnstone has surely noted that real-world AI now gives people enough to fear. The dial is duly cranked from horror to full-blown comedy. To begin, there is a bait-and-switch of a whole other genre. The opening plays like an espionage action movie, with a new walking, talking, lethally self-defining AI. This one is called Amelia. (Johnstone's eerie timing now somehow extends to setting this initial mayhem on the Iranian border.) Back in the US, the principals from the first film reassemble. Orphan Cady (Violet McGraw) navigates high school while roboticist aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), who first crafted her an AI pal, is now all-in on ethical tech. Johnstone keeps us waiting; hopefully it isn't a spoiler to say the anti-heroine of the title makes a belated entrance, flawless tween deadpan intact. "Yes, it's me," she breezes. "What a shock, etc." (She/it is played once more by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis.) The rest is knowingly witty and cannily knockabout. A stickler might ask if a two-hour running time was really needed, but Johnstone's design is clever. One moment you are invited to consider paper-clip theory and issues of AI regulation (the movie could make a ticklish double bill with Jesse Armstrong's tech bro farce Mountainhead). The next, you're in the kind of timeless sci-fi satire where figures in white coats wield giant syringes. You might smugly note the allusions to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, or simply enjoy the barrage of smart, silly gags. I confess, at least once, I LOL'd. Even critics are only human.

Movie Review: 'M3GAN 2.0' goes big, maybe too big, to 'Mission: Impossible'-level existential crisis

If you want to know how big an upgrade the "M3GAN" sequel has on the original, look no further than the very first scene. "M3GAN" was mostly set in a Seattle house, but "M3GAN 2.0" starts at the Turkish-Iranian border -- with a murderous rampage in a secret military installation and the presence of Saudi intelligence, with U.S. Defense Department officials covertly watching. Two hours later, it's not clear if this is really an upgrade. Most of the same team that gave us the refreshing horror-comedy original two years ago have not only gone super-big, but also changed the franchise's genre, turning "M3GAN 2.0" into an action movie with two AI robots, two villains, FBI units, wingsuits, neural implants, a "Mission: Impossible"-style vault heist, exosuits, a 250-mph street chase in a supercar, a power grid disaster, a countdown clock, the United Nations and the fate of the planet at stake. If the evil doll M3gan in the first movie was responsible for the deaths of four humans and one dog, this time the screen is littered with the corpses of shootings, decapitations, severed limbs and laser slayings. There are double-crosses, impalings, blood splatter, cattle prods, tactical military soldiers, self-destruct sequences and insane close-combat martial arts. You can be forgiven for expecting a Tom Cruise appearance. What you won't get is much of the vibe of the original, which fused horror, cultural commentary and humor. This time, that's muted in favor of an overly ambitious, horribly convoluted plot that sometimes feels like the moviemakers just threw money at the sequel and tried to ape other franchises by going massive. The first had a bedroom feel; the new one starts, like we said, on an international border. The original's $12 million budget has been tripled. "M3GAN 2.0" owes a lot to "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," in which the robot killer in the first movie becomes the robot hero of the second. M3gan, it will come as no surprise, wasn't killed at the end of the original. She's just been laying low, waiting for her time to seize the day -- and dance. Now she is reborn to fight another, better AI robot, played with sinister lethality by Ivanna Sakhno. "M3GAN" arrived in 2023 just as AI technology like ChatGPT was beginning to go mainstream. Director and screenwriter Gerard Johnstone turns Allison Williams -- who plays M3gan's creator, Gemma -- into a high-profile author and advocate for government oversight of artificial intelligence as the sequel opens. One of the more intriguing questions the movie explores is if parents are gradually outsourcing their responsibilities to technology. Her niece Cady -- the fabulous Violet McGraw -- is now a budding computer programmer and rebellious. She has learned aikido and has a strong affinity for Steven Seagal, a running gag. Her protection is still the single focus of M3gan, who has apparently been in cloud networks between movies. Facing a global existential threat, Gemma is convinced to build a body for M3gan to go toe-to-toe with the military-grade AI killing machine known as Amelia. "Everyone deserves a second chance," Cady tells her aunt. But whose side is M3gan really on? And what does Amelia really want? Some of the movie's best parts are when M3gan and Amelia face off. "You're not family to them," the new AI model says to the old. "You're just the help." There's some cool robotic dancing -- a highlight of the original -- and a return of M3gan's camel-colored silk sateen dress that became popular at Halloween. Johnstone has smartly kept the offbeat humor of the original, this time with clever nods to "Knight Rider" and a surreal use of the Kate Bush song "This Woman's Work." Jemaine Clement from "Flight of the Conchords" has fun as an arrogant tech billionaire, while Brian Jordan Alvarez and Jen Van Epps return as Gemma's tech teammates, this time crawling through ducts or getting choked almost to death. We wouldn't be here if someone had taken the advice of Ronny Chieng's character in the original movie: "I want you to take this cyborg puppet show and put it in a dark closet where it belongs." Not after grossing $180 million worldwide. "M3GAN 2.0" was inevitable, but it didn't have to be so inevitably too much. "M3GAN 2.0," a Universal Pictures release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 for "strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language, sexual material and brief drug references." Running time: 120 minutes. Two stars out of four.

M3GAN 2.0 review: The AI camp queen pulls a Terminator 2

M3GAN was an unexpected hit, and for good reason: It was the best killer toy horror film since Child's Play, combining comedy and camp with a meme-worthy android lead. For the sequel, writer/director Gerard Johnstone (working off a story from him and the first film's writer Akela Cooper), have taken a few notes from Terminator 2. This time around, there's an even more evil android on the scene (Amelia, played by Ivanna Sakhno) who wants AI to rule the world. And there's only one somewhat less evil android that can stop her: M3GAN. If that setup sounds silly and campy to you, well... it is. That's the point. More so than the first film, M3GAN 2.0 leans into the sheer silliness of its premise and is all the more fun for it. It's also not really a horror movie this time, it's a full-on action film with tons of gunplay, hand-to-hand combat and one wingsuit infiltration sequence that would be right at home in a Mission: Impossible film. Speaking of Mission: Impossible, it's hard not to notice that M3GAN 2.0 features practically the same AI takeover plotline that bogged down The Final Reckoning. The difference here is that it's actually somewhat well-informed -- M3GAN 2.0 isn't just about "evil AI," it also explores (however briefly) the notion of AI autonomy, technology regulation and ethics. (For God sakes, there's a killer Section 230 joke that only tech-savvy readers would understand.) M3GAN 2.0 once again centers on Gemma (Allison Williams), the engineer who originally created M3GAN, and her niece Cady (Violet McGraw). Following the events of the first film, Gemma was briefly sent to jail but reemerges as a technology critic. (Isn't it funny how many "tech critics" pop up after making bank from Big Tech?) She then teams up with a tech ethicist (Aristotle Athari) to push governments for stronger technology regulation, especially when it comes to AI. The existence of Amelia seems to prove her point. In the opening of M3GAN 2.0, we watch as she goes on a covert mission to rescue a military scientist, only to disobey her programming and kill him instead. It turns out Amelia was built on the bones of M3GAN's design, and for some reason she's aiming to kill everyone involved with her creation. That mission inevitably leads back to Gemma and Cady, of course. It's not a spoiler to say that M3GAN didn't really die at the end of the first movie. Turns out, she backed herself up to the cloud and has been watching Gemma and Cady via their smart home devices. After a set piece involving inept FBI agents, M3GAN convinces Gemma that she needs some sort of physical body to stop Amelia. Funnily enough, her first new outfit is the not at all fictional Moxie child companion robot I tested a few years ago. (Embodied, the startup behind Moxie, folded last year, leaving its handful of customers with a dead robot. That may be why Moxie M3GAN is allowed to swear.) M3GAN gets her wish and, like the Six Million Dollar Man, receives a fully upgraded body, one that's better, faster and stronger. (And also one that's more befitting of Amie Donald, the talented young actress who plays her.) And at that point, the movie turns into a full-on action fest as M3GAN infiltrates a tech lab to save Cady. Thankfully, MEGAN 2.0 understands the assignment: Fight scenes are energetic and well-choreographed, and Johnstone makes sure that everything is easily legible. The multitude of Steven Seagal references also makes it clear he's a fan of schlocky action cinema. Johnstone is also clearly a tech nerd: the film is filled with references to places like Xerox PARC, one of the early R&D labs that developed concepts like the GUI (graphical user interface) and mouse. There's an Elon Musk analog, played by the great Jemaine Clement, who has an over-inflated ego and an obsession with brain interface devices. And the film pokes fun at anti-tech crusaders, who sometimes push back against any sort of technological advancement as inherently evil. M3GAN 2.0 balances a smart view of tech alongside sheer summer movie fun. And while it runs close to two hours, it never feels like a slog like the nearly three-hour long The Final Reckoning. Both movies are about the impending doom of an AI apocalypse, but M3GAN 2.0 manages to do it without being too self-serious and far more well-informed. Now that it seems like we're just a few clicks away from some sort of tech apocalypse, poking fun at it just seems like a better way to cope.

"M3GAN 2.0" Is a Victim of Inflation

With "M3GAN 2.0," the franchising of the 2022 sci-fi-horror mashup "M3GAN" suffers from sequelitis. At least it shows its symptoms clearly: inflammation and swelling. In the first film, Gemma (Allison Williams), a robotics engineer, becomes the guardian to her orphaned niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), and tests a new invention, the titular A.I.-powered robot-doll, on her. Cady grows attached to the responsive doll, which is programmed to protect the child and takes to the mission with a mechanical perfection, slaughtering anyone who expresses hostility -- and does so with snarky pride in her absolute power. At its core, though, "M3GAN" (like the sequel, directed by Gerard Johnstone) is a family melodrama centered on Gemma's struggles with parenting and Cady's need to bond -- plus the robot's quick embrace of human cruelty. The film's failures are painful because its setup is fruitful. "M3GAN 2.0" heralds a genre shift from the start, with a title card that places the opening scene near the Turkish-Iranian border. There, an unidentified all-male plainclothes militia captures and shoots, at point-blank range, a female photographer who claims to be a tourist. Fear not: she's not human but M3ganical in body and soul, rising back up to kill her way out of the ordeal and heedlessly slaughtering her captors and a person of interest to the U.S. government. At a secret defense-department conference in Palo Alto, her identity is revealed: she's Amelia (properly, all caps, because the name is an acronym in which the M is for "military"), and one of her handlers, speaking into a mike, absurdly accuses her of disobeying orders. The narrow programming of Amelia (played by Ivanna Sakhno) has made her as relentlessly amoral a killing machine as M3GAN proved to be in the first film; and, though Gemma is now an activist on behalf of rigorous international governmental control of the seemingly limitless powers of A.I., she comes under official suspicion of being the brains behind the rogue robot. In order to clear her name -- and to save the world -- she has to bring Amelia down. It turns out, in one of the many vague and facile plot points on which "M3GAN 2.0" depends, that the first movie's monster, M3GAN, whom Gemma had apparently destroyed, has survived, and Gemma recruits her to take on Amelia. As the geopolitical spectrum of the plot widens, the cast of characters swells to match. Along with the return of Cady and of Gemma's scientific collaborators, Tess (Jen Van Epps) and Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez), there's the lead government agent, Tim Sattler (Timm Sharp), who keeps coming back for more punishment; Christian Bradley (Aristotle Athari), Gemma's partner in activism whose first name is, pointedly, pronounced "Christián," and whose craving for the spotlight hints at dark shadows; and yet another A.I. robot, a toylike miniature called (wait for it) Maxi. Best of all, there's the scientist Alton Appleton, a wizard of neural-implant technology, played by Jemaine Clement, who gives his every clichéd line a wry, surprising twist -- and who, despite his all-too-brief onscreen presence, dominates the movie to an unwarranted extent, because his device for silent and undetectable communication by thought alone plays a lopsidedly large role in the story. In other words, the cast expands in order to assign faces to plot points, which expand in order to put the budget onscreen by way of large-scale action scenes. The movie features a frenzied car chase that reaches F1 speeds, a huge night-club-style dance party where M3GAN (again played by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis) gets to strut her stuff, and a riotous battle at a teeming A.I. convention. The sets include secret tunnels and hidden vaults, a concealed subterranean laboratory, and even a so-called vault within a vault that's part of a massive research facility camouflaged in an innocuous low-tech business. (Best of all -- yes, showcasing Clement again -- are Alton's finger-snap controls of the high-tech kinetic décor of his "Down with Love"-style high-income-bachelor pad.) And Gemma and her cohorts are forced to develop new technologically advanced gizmos in a hurry and repurpose items on the fly in order to do battle with enemies amid the snares and dangers of these elaborate settings. The bombastic bloat of "M3GAN 2.0" brought to mind another misbegotten and overinflated sequel, "Ant-Man and the Wasp," which tethered the most freewheelingly whimsical Marvel creation, the protagonist of the first "Ant-Man," to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and expanded the story, the action, and the cast to match -- and, in the process, dispelled the charm of the original. Yet, for all the stifling sense of boardroom-dominated creativity that afflicts even the best of the Marvel movies, these films also do the heavy lifting of developing a fantasy universe by giving the characters at least a modicum of definition in order to set the stakes of the action and personalize it, and by envisioning in some detail the technology, however ludicrous, that the superheroes' powers depend on. In contrast, "M3GAN 2.0" is a shapeless grab bag of tones and genres that ramps up its stakes with A.I.-endowed robots wielding seemingly limitless powers that come close to comic-book superheroics, as when M3GAN returns from destruction or -- in the moment where the movie definitively jumps the shark -- leaps off a rocky bluff and flies, Superman-style, to her target. The technology is the most interesting part of the sequel, but there's both far too much hand-waving and far too little curiosity about the imaginative devices on which the film is centered. The screenplay (by Johnstone) perceptively touches on the core theme of "M3GAN": namely, morality -- the problem of a machine that simulates humanity without the ideas, intuitions, and emotions that complicate and moderate human behavior -- and then leaves it merely touched on, again as a quick plot point rather than as a realm of experience for robots and their creators. This, too, becomes a matter of a device, which turns up all too conveniently, like much of the gadgetry in "M3GAN 2.0," such as Gemma's crash project to devise a mechanical hand with a human thermal profile -- no time frame, no struggle, no problem. Even the elaborate martial-arts-proximate combat, whether involving humans or robots, feels routine and underimagined. Comedic without being a comedy, camp-winking without being campy, sentimental without developing relationships, offering fight scenes without being an action film, replete with advanced technology yet hardly science fiction, very briefly grotesque without delivering horror -- "M3GAN 2.0" has little dramatic shape and no directorial style. In striving for more than the original, it achieves far less. ♦

â€~M3GAN 2.0’ Is an Antihero Upgrade, But at a Cost

M3GAN gets her 'Terminator 2' moment in an action-packed sequel that loses some of the first film's horror charms. M3GAN 2.0 delivers a bloody slay of a sequel, one that elevates Blumhouse's sci-fi horror darling and gives its icon an action-packed upgradeâ€"one that works, albeit at the expense of the original's horror roots. You can't keep a killer down, or a killer doll for that matter, as the end of the first film teased, as 2.0 opens with M3GAN (voiced by Jenna Davis, and physically portrayed by Amie Donald) having taken refuge in the cloud after he defeat. In the sequel, we discover that while Gemma (Allison Williams) and Cady (Violet McGraw) worked through their new family dynamic, M3GAN worked through how maybe she jumped to extremes with her relentless directive to protect her assigned child. Her omni-presence to Gemma and Cady is cleverly revealed when Gemma becomes the target of an assassination attempt by a weaponized android named AMELIA (Ahsoka's Ivanna Sakhno) who has turned on its creators and operators. This includes Gemma, as AMELIA was programed utilizing stolen files of her M3GAN designs from the first filmâ€"putting Cady's life in danger once more. M3GAN 2.0 matures its main villain into an anti-hero with a satisfying pivot that pulls a similar success story to the evolution of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator in Terminator 2. M3GAN is as sassy as ever, and self-aware that her previous actions were dangerous, but plays into the metanarrative around the original film that made her an immediate camp icon. Williams' performance compliments M3GAN's own evolution perfectly, as she plays up Gemma with Elizabeth Holmes tones to explain away her inability to make human connections with new goal of her own: to make up for the lack of oversight she had on her tech, she's now an advocate for regulations in AI advancements for big corporations. Evolving both women before pushing them to work together to defend Cady from AMELIA is a smart move that 2.0 mines to great effect. It's such a bold move that no longer pits these strong as hell women against each other (honestly, giving Cady two mother figures now is iconic, and feels like another self-aware nod to M3GAN's IRL embrace of being a queer icon). It's also just fun to see the ways they also feed into each other's darker impulses: you see Gemma take a chance on M3GAN as AMELIA hunts one of the Musk-esque minds that made her, by letting M3GAN loose again in an updated, snazzier body. It's here 2.0 begins to establish itself as more of an action film send up than another horror film, a divergence that it manages to do mostly successfully. Some fans might be disappointed by the switchâ€"M3GAN literally loses her edge for most of the film when Gemma adds a chip to her system to dial down her killer response. Whether it's mostly to keep it PG-13 or not, returning director Gerard Johnstone tosses creepiness out the window early on, for better or worse. After the first act of setup, 2.0 goes full-throttle with its action set-pieces (including of course, a mandatory training montage), but again, much of the blood and gore of the first film is lost in exchange for over-the-top, slick action. There's still as much blood as the film can possibly get away with, but that's more on AMELIA's part than M3GAN, to her and our frustration. Johnstone leans on balancing the comedy and action with riffs on tropes from genre that suit M3GAN, but checking boxes doesn't exactly offer anything new in the process. It leaves 2.0 feeling predictable as it builds towards its climax, making you want M3GAN's violence handicap device off sooner than laterâ€"and once we do get a return of the killer doll diva, the fun is fleeting, wrapping up the film a little too quickly, and a little too safely, for its own good. M3GAN 2.0 is solid, and mines M3GAN's place in the current pop culture moment for all it's worth, but it just doesn't push genre boundaries like the first film did. It put its own proverbial play-it-safe device on for most of the film to engage in a litany of classic action movie tropes, which are fun, but occasionally border on parody. The film remains an entertaining romp, and M3GAN's redemption arc is the film's strength, but some of the ways we get there overstay their need, especially if fans of the original's flair for fun and inventive violence get sparks of the original's in moments that come few and far between along the way. That push and pull between acknowledging the viral success of the original even rubs off on M3GAN's wit in the process, with 2.0 at times lacking the sharp touch of original M3GAN screenwriter Akeela Cooper. Perhaps a third, almost inevitable at this point, entry in the series could find a better balance between the horror charms of the original and the second's high-camp action thrills. She still dances, she still can accessorize, but this time there's no sharp edges included in the box.Â

Review | 'M3gan 2.0' updates its programming for a cheeky action-thriller

M3gan in "M3gan 2.0," directed by Gerard Johnstone. (Geoffrey Short/Universal Pictures) (2.5 stars) Any technology we don't fully comprehend we turn into horror, a truism that reaches back to Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" (medical science) and ahead to "The Ring" (VCRs). Of late, the bogeymen have been AI and robotics, so we get movies like "Ex Machina" and villains like the Entity in the "Mission: Impossible" movies. And "M3gan" (2022), which mashed up "Ex Machina" and Chucky from the Child's Play franchise for a big, goofy hit about an artificially intelligent doll that takes its directive to protect its owner to murderous extremes. A sequel was inevitable, and since the only thing anyone talked about with the first movie was the doll, in "M3gan 2.0," she has morphed from the series's creepy-crawly villain to something very much like its hero. This is not a spoiler, this is canon. (See "Terminator 2.") The movie itself has metastasized from a tidy scream fest to a noisy, sprawling action-thriller-sci-fi extravaganza with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Which would be annoying if the filmmakers took any of it seriously. But writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper, both returnees, keep the pace fast enough to paper over the incomprehensible plot and, more important, retain the first movie's self-mocking humor. The result is enjoyably over-the-top summer junk, which, honestly, a lot of us could use right now. Also returning are Allison Williams as Gemma Forrester, the roboticist and toy developer who invented M3gan and in the new film has become a vocal advocate for limiting children's access to technology (reasonable enough when an AI doll has tried to kill most of your friends); Violet McGraw as Gemma's niece Cady, now a moody 12-year-old and budding computer coder; and Gemma's research associates, stalwart Tess (Jen Van Epps) and klutzy Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez). Where's M3gan? As the end of the last film hinted, hanging out in Gemma's smart-home network, waiting to be re-bodied. When a bigger, badder AI cyborg from a Department of Defense operation goes rogue, Gemma and her team are tasked with finding it before it finds the film's MacGuffin, which isn't exactly a floppy disk, but you're getting warm. I can tell you that M3gan does make an eventual triumphant appearance in her original form, which is to say she still looks like an extra Olsen twin left out in the lab overnight. (Amie Donald continues to play the doll in scenes where the character isn't straight-up CGI, and Jenna Davis once more provides M3gan's chipper/snarly voice.) Before then, there's some fine found comedy involving the genie of M3gan in the bottle of a Teletubby-style toy, and the striking Ukrainian actress Ivanna Sakhno has been cast as the rogue cyborg, Amelia, giving off a chilly/sexy Terminatrix vibe that's the scariest thing in the movie. But where "M3gan" was content to dabble in jump scares and PG-13 slasher tropes, "M3gan 2.0" has its eye on the bigger prize of anchoring the title character as a major pop-culture icon. (Think Freddy Krueger or the Minions.) The sequel is full of soldiers and SWAT teams running this way and that, busy fight scenes and action sequences, a miraculous basement research facility with everything you need to stop Armageddon, a secret villain you'll spot from the first frame, and everything short of a countdown doomsday device. Whoops, the movie has that, too. It also has a willingness to undercut any solemnity with welcome silliness. Jemaine Clement ("What We Do in the Shadows," "Flight of the Conchords") is deliciously pompous as a tech CEO with a neuro-implant that gets him out of his wheelchair and onto the dance floor -- it's a pity "M3gan 2.0" doesn't do more with him. M3gan herself/itself has been given all the snarky comeback lines but still bursts into treacly pop songs at the most inopportune times. The movie feels preprogrammed, but the programming works. Williams's task is to keep a straight face as the film's nominal lead character, which she does ably and rather anonymously. Anyway, the humans are decidedly secondary in this franchise. There are some half-formed ideas in the script about using technology cautiously if we don't want to lose out to the coming AI master race. But based on the likely box office receipts for this movie, I'd say the AI has already won. PG-13. At area theaters. Contains strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language, sexual material, brief drug references. 119 minutes. Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr's Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.

The people behind 'M3gan 2.0' think AI might be good, actually

Allison Williams returns to "M3gan 2.0" as Gemma, the tech engineer who created the titular robot. (Universal Pictures) The robot that cleans Allison Williams's home is called Pauna Gauna. The vacuum was named by the "Girls" and "Get Out" actress's toddler, and the family refers to it using she/her pronouns. Williams has even caught herself thanking the "giant hockey puck" out loud for its work. After starring in 2022's "M3gan," a horror hit about an adorable android that murders any threat it perceives, Williams may have developed a healthy deference to the automatons in her life. "I feel confident that being respectful of what [robots] are achieving on our behalf can't be bad," Williams said in a recent interview. "I don't know why. It's not like I think Pauna Gauna is going to somehow turn on our family and attack us if we're not nice to her. It's more that I am aware that we are in relationship with each other. She's improving my day. And for anything that improves my day, and makes it so I'm not vacuuming our dog's hair up 24/7, I'm grateful. Thank you, Pauna Gauna." If you've spent any time with M3gan, you would respond that way -- especially now that the killer doll is back for a sequel. "M3gan" painted the titular android as a villain, an AI-enhanced toy who tried to replace brilliant designer Gemma (Williams) as the caretaker of her niece Cady (Violet McGraw). It was a genre sensation, but the sequel "M3gan 2.0," which opened last week, adopts a much softer approach: Gemma must now bring M3gan back online to help defeat a rogue assassin robot, Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), who was created using a stolen copy of M3gan's original design. It's an enemies-to-friends plot between a human and her wayward creation -- and evidence, if you were looking for any, that Hollywood might be evolving past pure fearmongering about AI. Skip to end of carousel The Style section Style is The Washington Post's place for news from the front lines of culture -- arts, media, politics, trends and fashion. For more Style stories, click here. To subscribe to the Style Memo newsletter, click here. End of carousel If you haven't witnessed M3gan in action, understand that these movies are bonkers. The original went viral for a dance scene in which the robot, dressed coquettishly, swings her hips around before murdering Gemma's boss. An even more outlandish moment might be when she sings a mellow version of David Guetta and Sia's "Titanium" as a lullaby to Cady. In the sequel, M3gan sings Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work" to Gemma when she struggles with feeling like she has failed Cady as a parent. (Remember Marnie covering Kanye West on "Girls?" It's like that.) The character is created using both an animatronic and human actresses: Amie Donald performs M3gan's more complex physical movements (with visual effects smoothing things over), while Jenna Davis provides the robot's voice. As campy as these movies are, the shift to an AI-friendly narrative feels significant. Hollywood has grappled with artificial intelligence for decades (and has even given us a classic enemies-to-friends killer robot plot in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day"), but there has been a discernible uptick in recent years. In the last two Mission: Impossible movies, for instance, Tom Cruise's primary enemy is a malevolent artificial intelligence known as the Entity, which threatens to hack systems and set off nuclear missiles across the globe. The Entity acts of its own accord, just as Amelia does. Director Gerard Johnstone was originally drawn to the cautionary tale aspect of "M3gan," which screenwriter Akela Cooper based on a story she envisioned with producer James Wan. Johnstone said the first film seemed like "a way to express all of the frustrations I had that I didn't get to raise with my children's teachers or the school. Should they even be on iPads? Should they be on computers this much?" And so on. The sequel, he continued, offered him "a chance to have a more nuanced conversation about [new technology]. AI itself is not inherently bad. But obviously it's only as good as the person training it." In "M3gan 2.0," which he wrote, Johnstone channels his fears into Gemma, who we discover has pivoted from manufacturing robot dolls to advocating for the regulation of similar AI. As much as she wants to control the world her niece will grow up in, she knows she can only do so much. She acknowledges that AI is here to stay and pushes for responsible use of the tool. Gemma learns of Amelia's existence from federal agents who accuse her of having hacked into the murderous robot, which went rogue while on a mission for the U.S. government. Even though Gemma didn't create Amelia, she feels guilt for having coded the original design. Is it really her fault? Maybe not, depending on how you think about tech and its consequences, but she takes responsibility, anyway. Williams, who became a mother around when she began playing Gemma, said she and her character have lived "in parallel with each other." Just like Gemma, Williams noticed her own "existential fear and concern and amazement about AI" deepen when she observed her son interact with it. She has witnessed firsthand "what it's like to see a 3½-year-old try to process what ChatGPT is," she said. She noticed "how intoxicating it is for him," even without an android form. In the new film, Gemma forms an emotional bond to M3gan. Sure, the robot was programmed to care for Cady, but isn't the care itself valuable? If Cady is responding well, does it matter whether M3gan is "artificial"? With these questions, the sequel wades into discourse far beyond its rather silly universe. Actual humans are using ChatGPT as therapy. Tabloids reported on a man crying "his eyes out" after proposing to his AI chatbot girlfriend. Are we doing okay? "M3gan 2.0" seems to think everything will turn out fine so long as we remain disciplined and AI stays benevolent -- which it suggests is our collective responsibility to ensure. Some screenwriters worry about being replaced by generative AI, but Johnstone sees it as more of a tool to improve efficiency. He uses ChatGPT for "really, really banal tasks," he said, like coming up with character names. Surely that isn't going to evolve into something that can destroy humanity, right? (Right??) Inspired by her relationship to Pauna Gauna -- which, to be clear, is not powered by AI -- Williams wonders whether the word "tool" really captures the role such advanced technology has started to play in daily life. We might not yet be buying M3gan dolls off department store shelves, but think of how many people turn to AI-powered features like Alexa to accomplish daily tasks. "I know they're designed to be tools and are often spoken of in that way, but this movie is begging the question of, is that the right word to use? Is that the most respectful way to see this relationship, or is there something more?" she said. "We spend a ton of time literally making horror movies about this topic, and yet we use AI regularly in our lives. I feel like that is telling."

'M3GAN 2.0' takes the killer robot doll in a ridiculous new direction -- and it mostly works

The original "M3GAN" succeeded in part thanks to its simple, straightforward premise: Robot doll turns murderous. There's nothing simple or straightforward about the new sequel "M3GAN 2.0" (in theaters Friday), which is both a strength and a liability for writer-director Gerard Johnstone's film. It's impossible to say that "M3GAN 2.0" is just a repeat of its predecessor, which is a trap that too many horror sequels fall into. But by shifting so sharply away from small-scale horror into what is essentially a superhero action movie, "M3GAN 2.0" loses a bit of what made the first film so appealing. Still, I'll take an ambitious mess over a boring retread, and even at its messiest, "M3GAN 2.0" is lively and fun, full of the same snarky humor and gleeful nastiness as the original. The first movie rose to popularity on a wave of memes, and there are times when "M3GAN 2.0" is clearly trying to engineer new meme-able moments. It's tough to recapture that same kind of viral attention, but even if "M3GAN 2.0" doesn't equal the first movie's quotable charms, it has plenty of memorably outrageous bits. The biggest change between the "M3GAN" movies is that M3GAN herself is now more or less on the side of the good guys. Originally designed as an android companion for young orphan Cady (Violet McGraw), M3GAN (played onscreen by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis) went rogue in the first movie, taking her mandate of protecting Cady way too far by murdering anyone she perceived as detrimental to the child's happiness. There's now a much more dangerous threat in the form of Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), a military-grade android who's disobeyed her programming and seems intent on staging a robot uprising. Of course, M3GAN wasn't actually destroyed at the end of the first movie, and her electronic consciousness lives on, keeping tabs on Cady and Gemma (Allison Williams), Cady's engineer aunt and M3GAN's designer. When government agents break into Gemma and Cady's house demanding information about Amelia, who was built using M3GAN's initial designs, M3GAN reveals herself and offers to help track down her megalomaniacal counterpart. The most obvious touchstone for this transition is James Cameron's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," which refashioned Arnold Schwarzenegger's killer cyborg into an ally for potential human savior John Connor (Edward Furlong) and his mother Sarah (Linda Hamilton). M3GAN even ends up with an inhibitor that prevents her from killing humans, just like the order that John gives to the T-800 in "Terminator 2." But there's also a long history of superhero stories about wary team-ups between heroes and villains in order to take on bigger enemies, putting M3GAN alongside characters like Magneto and Loki. Like those characters, she retains her devious edge even as she agrees to a truce with Gemma and semi-apologizes for her past behavior. In that way, "M3GAN 2.0" gets to revel in M3GAN's violent actions and snarky asides while making her into a more palatable -- and even nuanced -- protagonist. It takes nearly an hour of the overlong two-hour movie before M3GAN is once again fully functional, though. There's way too much set-up to get to that point, involving Gemma's new role as an activist for responsible technology, working with her smarmy boyfriend Christian (Aristotle Athari), plus Gemma's tech start-up with returning colleagues Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) and Tess (Jen Van Epps). Jemaine Clement has an amusing supporting role as a grandiose tech mogul who wants Gemma to work with him, but he mostly serves as a red herring, disappearing from the movie far too early. By the time M3GAN convinces Gemma to build her a new, stronger, taller body, the world is already on the verge of an AI apocalypse, and "M3GAN 2.0" has practically turned into a "Mission: Impossible" movie. There are multiple sub-missions within the main mission, leading to lengthy villain monologues and somewhat obvious plot twists. There are also some well-staged action sequences, including a battle between M3GAN and Amelia at a tech conference in a neon-lit corridor that looks like something out of "Tron." There's some genuine character development for Gemma, Cady and M3GAN, with strong performances (including Donald and Davis working well in tandem). It gets excessive and tiresome after a while, especially in the drawn-out climax involving multiple reversals. "M3GAN 2.0" doesn't resemble a horror movie at all, but it's not like the original "M3GAN" was all that scary. By expanding the character's world, Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper set the stage for future installments, making M3GAN into a high-profile vigilante who could take on any future nemesis. The message about technology and AI is hopelessly muddled by the end, but the message about M3GAN herself remains clear: She's fierce and formidable, and she isn't going anywhere.

'M3GAN 2.0' review: The killer queen has been murdered by broad appeal

Gemma (Allison Williams) and M3GAN in "M3GAN 2.0," directed by Gerard Johnstone. Credit: Universal Studios Do you remember the fervor when the teaser for M3GAN hit back in the fall of 2022, revealing her eerie yet exciting dance ahead of a sassy slaughter? Just like that, a fandom arose, eagerly anticipating the fierce slaying antics of a murdering doll who looked like she came from an American Girl store. She was an instant horror icon, embraced by women, teens, and the LGBTQ+ community. Awed by her audaciousness and her stone-cold face card, we were eager to worship at her feet, which were clad in perfectly polished Mary Janes. The movie itself thrilled critics and audiences alike, digging into the expectations of killer doll horror, from vicious kills to creepy singing and a snarling sense of dark humor. Plus, there was something distinctly queer in the co-parenting relationship between the robo-nanny and her creator, Gemma (Allison Williams). So, we M3GAN lovers cheered when a sequel was announced, dreaming up a Terminator 2-like scenario that might go more deeply into the horror-musical terrain. Well, be careful what you wish for. M3GAN 2.0 brings us the robo v. robo showdown we wanted. But its filmmakers have utterly lost their way. Unlike the first film, this doesn't feel like a movie for the girls, gays, and theys who cheered M3GAN since she first sashayed down that hallway. This sequel feels like the filmmakers were trying to make a movie for everyone who didn't get their villain's appeal the first time around. And they're doing it by making her a superhero. From the opening sequence of this sequel, director and co-writer Gerard Johnstone (M3GAN, Housebound) makes clear the franchise's genre has shifted dramatically. Audiences are ushered into a standard black ops mission, where a mysterious operative is meant to collect the engineer of a lethal chemical gas. But instead, she kills him and taunts the remote observers who watch her through her installed cameras. This is Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), a robo-agent made covertly from M3GAN's blueprint. She's a threat to the killer doll's estranged human family... and all of mankind. AI uprising, yadda yadda yadda -- you know the drill. But M3GAN 2.0 will gratuitously explain it anyway. Before this android assassin gate-crashes their home, Gemma and Cady (Violet McGraw) have rebuilt a pretty cozy life in the wake of the disastrous M3GAN launch. Gemma has pivoted to a book deal and establishing an advocacy foundation that combats the intrusion of AI into parenting. Cady is getting into computer science and coding, and is irate that her guardian keeps cutting off her screentime. But when their lives are threatened by Amelia, they reluctantly boot up M3GAN, giving the killer robot a second chance to be redeemed T2 style. However, far from the action-packed cat-and-mouse that comparison implies, M3GAN 2.0 goes espionage thriller in the dullest way possible. New characters are set up to be swiftly killed off, with none of the gritty, improvisational flair of the 1.0 version. Exposition dumps about missions, tech, and photocopiers go on and on, bogging down any possible momentum and forcing audiences to spend time with a tedious FBI oaf. And when it comes to the actual M3GAN versus Amelia of it all, the results are achingly underwhelming. Gone is the distinctive flair of M3GAN, replaced by a rushed sequel that hastily steals from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Black Mirror, any half-baked spy thriller, superhero power-ups, and much of the filmography of Steven Seagal, who is name-dropped far more than anyone could possibly predict. You'd like to think that with all the horror movie makers behind the scenes on M3GAN 2.0, from director Johnstone to producers James Wan and Jason Blum, working in big scares would be a given. And yet, there's hardly a fright to be found. While there's the occasional eerie comment from the eponymous killer doll, there are no scares worth noting. Like Loki from the MCU, M3GAN has been retooled to make her more appealing and less threatening -- therefore destroying a HUGE PART OF HER APPEAL! But this isn't the first time M3GAN's been revamped to appeal to a broader audience. In an interview with Mashable after M3GAN: Unrated was announced, the first film's screenwriter Akela Cooper revealed that her script for M3GAN was intended to be a hard-R horror story. "Once the first trailer came out," Cooper explained to Mashable contributor Karama Horne, "It had such a big response from teenagers in the TikTok community. Universal was like, 'There's your audience, [but] they technically can't go see R-rated films." Ahead of release, the movie was re-edited and reshoots were done to make M3GAN PG-13. The Unrated cut later premiered on streaming as a new way for fans to experience the chic killer doll. But the differences between the two cuts were minor and chiefly related to gore. Cooper is not credited on the screenplay for M3GAN 2.0, but gets credit for the story and for creating the original characters, alongside Wan. With its sequel, the franchise's move from horror to anything but is far more aggressive. M3GAN undergoes the standard superhero makeover, not only getting a taller body more capable of grappling, but also a cheeky anime-disguise to go undercover at a tech conference. But this departure strips away any groundedness the first film established. In appealing to action movie fans, it seems Universal and Blumhouse are specifically targeting a more mainstream male audience, one that might not have been awed by M3GAN. Hence, Steven Seagal being haphazardly introduced as Cady's personal idol, and Gemma -- who read as queer-coded in the first film -- being saddled with a boring boyfriend. The arguments between Gemma and M3GAN still have some subversive psycho-biddy horror energy -- like when Gemma says, "You threatened to rip out my tongue and put me in a wheelchair," to which M3GAN responds sharply, "I WAS UPSET!" But where the design of M3GAN wasn't a sexualized vision of femininity in the first film, Amelia absolutely is. Her body is slim yet curvy and metal-plated, like a modern men's magazine version of Maria of Metropolis, down to titanium breasts topped by an attractive human-like face that's far less rubbery than M3GAN's. Well, that is, when she's not on a covert mission. Then she dresses like a Bond girl, all shimmery low-cut evening wear meant to lure dumb men, like a toxic tech bro played by Jemaine Clement. The Male Gaze is strong in this one. Amie Donald and Jenna Davis return to play M3GAN's body and voice respectively, and they're a pair made in hell. And I mean that as a compliment on their Frankenstein creation. But sadly, too much of this movie is about Amelia, the FBI, and, inexplicably, Gemma's bumbling male co-worker (Brian Jordan Alvarez) -- while her female co-worker (Jen Van Epps) is sidelined. M3GAN 2.0 has too much screentime that has nothing to do with its main attraction. Whether a haunting voice in Gemma's AI home assistant, confined to a cutesy robot toy, or back in a redesign of her classic look, M3GAN is still the star here, even when the bits are beneath her. She'll dance again, now for a crowd. She'll sing in that unnerving high key in a scene that feels awkwardly wedged in as if it were an afterthought of fan service. And yet the most fun bit of the movie might be when she teams up with Gemma for some real sci-fi shit in a fight scene. It's surprising, creepy, and fun -- making sublime use of stunt performer excellence and the comedy skills of Williams and Davis. It's the rare moment when this sequel's concept actually works. The energy of M3GAN, chaotic and passionate, thrums through such scenes. But it's an inconsistent current, interrupted by the bizarre pitch to make it attract superhero movie fans. The result is a sequel that is a horrendous mishmash of ideas and influences. M3GAN 2.0 is occasionally outrageous, but mostly it's derivative, bewildering, and bland.

M3gan 2.0 review - hit-and-miss sequel replaces horror with action comedy

A solidly made and passably entertaining follow-up to the viral doll hit tries to swerve the franchise into summer blockbuster territory with mixed results As the very first image of devil doll sequel M3gan 2.0 emerges on screen, of a desert with the words "somewhere on the Turkish-Iranian border" popping up like it's a Bond movie, you'd be forgiven for double-checking if you're in the right cinema. The original, a grabby artificial intelligence (AI) riff on Child's Play and Annabelle, was a brisk, by-the-numbers domestic horror, released on the first weekend of 2023, a slot usually given to the very worst genre films. M3gan was smarter than most, often sly and frequently funny and introducing what's now become a rarity, an almost instant non-IP pop culture icon, whose virality exploded the film into a surprise smash (raking in over $180m from a $12m budget). Like the films it was inspired by, a franchise was inevitable although where we're taken in M3gan 2.0 was far less of a given. For the follow-up, writer-director Gerard Johnstone has swerved from horror to action while retaining and tweaking the comedy with a release date that's been upgraded to summer blockbuster territory. It doesn't always work - a two-hour runtime that's a little too long, world-saving stakes that are a little too big, funny lines that are a little too not funny - but it's a mostly watchable second-tier event movie that, in a world of inconsequential sequels that fail to justify their existence, will do. For M3gan 2.0, Johnstone has picked the Terminator 2 model, resurrecting M3gan to help destroy an even more evil robot called Amelia (Ukrainian actor Ivanna Sakhno) who has gone rogue. Since the previous film, understandably haunted roboticist Gemma (a returning Allison Williams, giving it her all once again) has rejigged her thinking on technology, fighting for the ethical use of AI and urging people to step away from their smartphones. But she's forced to team up with the monster she created when Amelia threatens not just the lives of those around her but the entire world. The details of how we get there are absurdly convoluted and it takes a while for Johnstone to convince us that an evil doll movie really needs this much political conspiracy and corporate intrigue (with the addition of every new espionage element, I had to keep reminding myself I was watching a M3gan movie). But it just about works with time, mostly down to its sheer energy, Johnstone pitching it as a goofy Mission: Impossible for younger teens (I did enjoy this mildly more than Tom Cruise's boringly bloated Final Reckoning). The tonal swerve is reminiscent of that employed in another Blumhouse sequel, Happy Death Day 2U that transformed a fun, gimmicky slasher into an indecipherable sci-fi romp. That film couldn't find a way out of the overly complicated mess it made for itself and the comparatively simple M3gan 2.0 finds a slicker way to reinvent itself. No one could have predicted just how many memes the first film would spawn but it was still written, by Malignant's Akela Cooper, with enough self-awareness to suggest that it wouldn't be a complete surprise. The campaign for the sequel had been rather worrying, however, veering from self-aware to smug, ads built entirely on camp cheek, trailers soundtracked by Britney Spears's Oops!... I Did It Again, grimly suggesting the film would be crippled by its thirst to go viral. It's surprisingly restrained though in that regard and any studio-mandated repetition - yes, she dances again; yes, she sings another ballad at an inopportune moment again - feels mostly organic (a rendition of Kate Bush's This Woman's Work is arguably more effective than Sia and David Guetta's Titanium was in the first). One of the major problems is that the comedy just doesn't quite land this time around, bar one genuinely funny bit involving Steven Seagal film titles. Johnstone took over writing duties from Cooper but he hasn't found a way to sustain M3gan's humour despite ample insert-zinger-here moments. It's also clear that Johnstone has retrofitted the film to act as an audition tape for bigger things, showcasing flashier adeptness on a much larger canvas, a sizzle reel to be sent on to execs looking for the next Marvel minion. His debut, Housebound, a thrilling comedy horror that pitched him as a mix of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, was a film of incredible ingenuity and it's hard not to feel a little disappointed, if not exactly surprised, that his way up the studio system has demanded that edges be smoothed out and ambitions remain boringly generic. The finale of M3gan 2.0 is as familiar as any superhero ending, if a little more coherently choreographed, and while it's sort of kind of just about effective enough (even if some muddled messaging about learning not to fear but coexist with AI is hard to stomach), I kept wishing we were in less well-charted territory. M3gan 2.0 isn't an upgrade or a downgrade, but M3gan 3.0 could do with some new code.

M3GAN 2.0, review: A riotous return for the viral psychotic doll

When the decision was made to produce a follow-up to M3GAN - the popular 2023 horror about an artificially intelligent doll that turns evil - writer-director Gerard Johnson faced what might be called the "Jurassic Park problem". In a sequel to a film in which a fun invention ends up causing the violent deaths of multiple innocent parties, how do you get one of the survivors to say with a straight face: "Right then, guys, who's up for building another one?" This uproarious (if not especially scary) sequel has the measure of the task at hand's silliness, and leans into it with infectious glee. However you thought a M3GAN sequel might begin, it probably wasn't with a helicopter shot of a desert compound and the caption: "Somewhere near the Turkey-Iran border" - yet here we are, in a highly topical war zone, where an even nimbler and more murderous M3GAN successor, known as Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), is in the process of becoming a headache for the US secret services. The only way to bring this new rogue AI under control, it transpires, is to boot up the old one in all her prim, pussy-bowed glory - and hope that this time she decides to take humanity's side.

It's the 'M3GAN' universe - and we're all about to be living in it

Davis says she first became aware of M3GAN's status as a queer icon on her phone, when she was tagged in fan edits. "Now she's at Pride Month, and it is so awesome because they're the most supportive community ever," Davis says. When asked if the team behind the film was expecting M3GAN to become a queer icon, Williams, through laughter, quickly replies: "No." "I think if we had been making her with the expectation that she would be a queer icon, she would have been dismissed by the queer community," Williams says. "It was like, if you just commit to the truth of it, making her feel like an authentic, real person, making all the characters real, making the world feel real, making the tone feel consistent, then you stand a better chance of creating a character that can be embraced by a community that loves a bold woman living in the truest expression of herself," she adds. "M3GAN 2.0" defies expectations once again by totally reinventing the character that made the franchise a hit. The sequel goes almost full action movie while highlighting the need for AI regulation. Two years after Gemma and her niece Cady neutralize M3GAN, they've resettled in San Francisco. Then, they learn a new robot is on the scene. A military contractor got hold of the leaked code that powered M3GAN and built a new robot: AMELIA, short for Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android. The feds put Gemma and her crew in charge of AMELIA when she, just like M3GAN, begins to go rogue. The only way to end AMELIA? Bring back M3GAN. Ivanna Sakhno, who portrays AMELIA, tells TODAY.com about joining the franchise as a new enemy. "There's definitely a sense of responsibility, because you know how beloved it is by people, so you want to just do it justice," Sakhno says. "I do have full trust in (director) Gerard (Johnstone) and his vision, and I have to applaud him for being so open to go so far with it and being unpretentious in its craziness. He wasn't afraid to do something quite different from the first one and take a risk." Davis also hopes audiences love the fighting scenes between M3GAN and AMELIA, as they start to see M3GAN as something other than just a villain. "I think the funny thing about M3GAN is, yes, she's a villain, but she can also be seen as a hero. But she's also hilarious, and she's sassy, and she doesn't care what you're saying, she just says it. I think it's really fun for audiences, because they don't know what's going to happen next for her, and they can't predict it." "I also think there's some kinship between AMELIA and M3GAN -- although there's rivalry and fear that is also felt, they see each other. They're made of the same seed. But M3GAN is that b----," Sakhno says with a smile, before adding, "Respectfully." While a third installment of "M3GAN" hasn't yet been greenlit, Williams, while appearing on TODAY on June 24, highlighted the fact there is a number "3" in the title of the films. "We put a three in the first title, which was a conundrum, and it sort of means we have to be allowed to," Williams said. "It's already been there, it's predestined." "That said," she added, "we are dreaming of a third. We have talked about it and wondered what it would look like, and we've had some of those conversations, but we'll need to see what happens this weekend." "M3GAN 2.0" is projecting $10 million in its opening weekend, according to Box Office Mojo, but regardless of whether the franchise becomes a trilogy, the M3GAN Cinematic Universe has already begun, Williams tells TODAY.com. "You can take a real, deep, important theme that's hard to talk about and put it into this mixy genre, and then suddenly people are able to talk about it in a bigger way," Williams says. "And then doing it with 'M3GAN,' I realized, you can keep doing this." Williams is an executive producer on "SOULM8TE," a "M3GAN" spinoff set in the same universe, premiering in 2026. The details on the film are minimal, though viewers do know that it follows a man who buys an android to help cope with the loss of his wife. "From the moment the M3GAN doll was an idea, we were kind of like, because people are people, we just know it's a matter of time before someone is like, 'What about this, but for sex?'" Williams says with a smile. "It's not just that, obviously, it's more complicated, and I don't want to spoil anything or give too many details, but it's sort of like an R-rated adventure into this world where we get to see M3GAN technology extrapolated into a use case that we do not explore in our franchise," she continues. Davis also calls the opportunities within the MCU "endless." "Especially because of how prevalent AI is in our society, and because of how uncanny it is," she says. "Even with the first film, they predicted AI portraits, and then they came out -- what are they predicting in this film that's going to come true?" Williams hopes that this franchise, which started as a question mark and then became a phenomenon, can spark relevant conversations about the world we're living in, or about to be. She points to the themes of the sequel -- AI regulation ("not the sexiest") and parenthood -- as an example. "We feel very strongly about the fact that people need to think about these things and to talk about them more openly. And we're just hopeful that, as a result of this movie and all the other movies in the cinematic universe, people will have those conversations on the way to the car," Williams says. "You can talk about the things that are funny, yeah, whatever. But like later at dinner, when the giggling dies down, it's like, 'But really, what are we doing? What is our plan here? What are we going to do about these really intelligent lines of code that we've written?'"

Movie Review: 'M3GAN 2.0' goes big, maybe too big, to 'Mission: Impossible'-level existential crisis

The sequel to the horror-comedy hit "M3GAN" takes a bold turn into action territory If you want to know how big an upgrade the "M3GAN" sequel has on the original, look no further than the very first scene. "M3GAN" was mostly set in a Seattle house, but "M3GAN 2.0" starts at the Turkish-Iranian border -- with a murderous rampage in a secret military installation and the presence of Saudi intelligence, with U.S. Defense Department officials covertly watching. Two hours later, it's not clear if this is really an upgrade. Most of the same team that gave us the refreshing horror-comedy original two years ago have not only gone super-big, but also changed the franchise's genre, turning "M3GAN 2.0" into an action movie with two AI robots, two villains, FBI units, wingsuits, neural implants, a "Mission: Impossible"-style vault heist, exosuits, a 250-mph street chase in a supercar, a power grid disaster, a countdown clock, the United Nations and the fate of the planet at stake. If the evil doll M3gan in the first movie was responsible for the deaths of four humans and one dog, this time the screen is littered with the corpses of shootings, decapitations, severed limbs and laser slayings. There are double-crosses, impalings, blood splatter, cattle prods, tactical military soldiers, self-destruct sequences and insane close-combat martial arts. You can be forgiven for expecting a Tom Cruise appearance. What you won't get is much of the vibe of the original, which fused horror, cultural commentary and humor. This time, that's muted in favor of an overly ambitious, horribly convoluted plot that sometimes feels like the moviemakers just threw money at the sequel and tried to ape other franchises by going massive. The first had a bedroom feel; the new one starts, like we said, on an international border. The original's $12 million budget has been tripled. "M3GAN 2.0" owes a lot to "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," in which the robot killer in the first movie becomes the robot hero of the second. M3gan, it will come as no surprise, wasn't killed at the end of the original. She's just been laying low, waiting for her time to seize the day -- and dance. Now she is reborn to fight another, better AI robot, played with sinister lethality by Ivanna Sakhno. "M3GAN" arrived in 2023 just as AI technology like ChatGPT was beginning to go mainstream. Director and screenwriter Gerard Johnstone turns Allison Williams -- who plays M3gan's creator, Gemma -- into a high-profile author and advocate for government oversight of artificial intelligence as the sequel opens. One of the more intriguing questions the movie explores is if parents are gradually outsourcing their responsibilities to technology. Her niece Cady -- the fabulous Violet McGraw -- is now a budding computer programmer and rebellious. She has learned aikido and has a strong affinity for Steven Seagal, a running gag. Her protection is still the single focus of M3gan, who has apparently been in cloud networks between movies. Facing a global existential threat, Gemma is convinced to build a body for M3gan to go toe-to-toe with the military-grade AI killing machine known as Amelia. "Everyone deserves a second chance," Cady tells her aunt. But whose side is M3gan really on? And what does Amelia really want? Some of the movie's best parts are when M3gan and Amelia face off. "You're not family to them," the new AI model says to the old. "You're just the help." There's some cool robotic dancing -- a highlight of the original -- and a return of M3gan's camel-colored silk sateen dress that became popular at Halloween. Johnstone has smartly kept the offbeat humor of the original, this time with clever nods to "Knight Rider" and a surreal use of the Kate Bush song "This Woman's Work." Jemaine Clement from "Flight of the Conchords" has fun as an arrogant tech billionaire, while Brian Jordan Alvarez and Jen Van Epps return as Gemma's tech teammates, this time crawling through ducts or getting choked almost to death. We wouldn't be here if someone had taken the advice of Ronny Chieng's character in the original movie: "I want you to take this cyborg puppet show and put it in a dark closet where it belongs." Not after grossing $180 million worldwide. "M3GAN 2.0" was inevitable, but it didn't have to be so inevitably too much. "M3GAN 2.0," a Universal Pictures release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 for "strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language, sexual material and brief drug references." Running time: 120 minutes. Two stars out of four.

One of 2023's Great Surprises at the Movies Is Back. Unfortunately, It's a Downgrade.

The taglines on M3GAN 2.0 posters read like text messages from an overconfident tween: "HEY, QUEENS." "MISS ME?" "I'M STILL THAT B." (Another that apparently exists, though I haven't seen in the wild, hilariously reads: "THIS BITCH.") Next to them, the titular robot who looks like an uncanny-valley Olsen twin peers from above circular sunglasses. Ain't she a stinker? This character that, per her 2023 film debut, will kill you and your little dog, too, is now being marketed with big child-star energy. While she always had more to offer than malice (her late-movie dance break went viral from its trailer alone), this moment marks a clear pivot on M3GAN's Mary Janes. There is truth in advertising. In M3GAN 2.0, the title character slides from villain to hero. Most of the major players from the first film are back, including brilliant coder/toy designer Gemma (Allison Williams) and the niece that she adopted, Cady (Violet McGraw). Last time around, Gemma saw the disastrousness of the combo of unfettered screen time and too-powerful A.I., so now she's a public advocate for limiting technology usage (her book, somehow, is called Modern Moderation). The needlessly dense plot of M3GAN 2.0 creates a perfect storm for M3GAN's redemption arc -- a new killer robot named AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) developed for governmental use is on the warpath, and everyone involved in her creation has died. Given that she was clearly inspired by M3GAN's technology, Gemma worries that she and her team may be next. Meanwhile, M3GAN returns as a kind of e-poltergeist that haunts Gemma's new smart house and communicates with her via the TV. She wants back into a body so she can carry out her mission of protecting Cady and offers to help in the battle to curb AMELIA, prompting Gemma and her team to build, as one character puts it, "a deranged robot to kill another one." Just as friends become lovers in When Harry Met Sally, so do heroes and villains become allies in M3GAN 2.0. It's an overt transition, and it results in a movie that is more action in genre than horror (a running gag is Cady's emulation of Steven Seagal and the aikido style of martial arts he practiced in his films). But M3GAN already had main-character tendencies despite her propensity for murder. Horror-movie monsters that toe this line tend to be charismatic and humorous -- a sassy-but-deadly template to which M3GAN adheres. She is somewhat like A Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Krueger, who punctuates his endlessly imaginative kills with pithy bon mots like "Welcome to prime time, bitch!" after smashing a psychiatric patient's head into a television. The Nightmare franchise gives its villain the space to luxuriate in the nightmares he created, increasingly turning down the hiding-in-the-shadows mystique and plumping his character via wit and, at times, camp. Using virtually the same playbook, the Child's Play series revels in the contrast between the apple-cheeked Good Guy doll form that Chucky inhabits and his bloodlust. It furnishes him with his own would-be catchphrases ("Nothing like a strangulation to get the circulation going!"), and, eventually, allows a domestic life to flourish in later-franchise entries Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky, movies that stretched the protagonist-ification of horror villains to its most absurd scenario. Across the board, a horror movie's monster is its draw (even if it's a love-to-hate appeal), but brutes like Friday the 13's Jason Voorhees and Halloween's Michael Myers stay firmly on the villain side of the spectrum by having as little characterization as possible -- Myers was referred to in John Carpenter and Debra Hill's original script as "the shape." That franchise also benefits from a strong decades-spanning final girl, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), who takes up the narrative slack that her silently homicidal adversary forgoes. Sometimes the villain-to-hero pipeline is really just about practicality to the plot. The Tyrannosaurus rex of Jurassic Park seems to have no redeeming qualities until, during the film's climax, she attacks and kills the even more insidious raptors. Said raptors eventually take a page from the book of T. rex by attacking and helping facilitate the death of the Indominus hybrid dino in Jurassic World. Those raptors communicate but don't quite attain the wisecracking, narrative-controlling status of Freddy or Chucky. However, The Terminator's T-800 comes close in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Arnold Schwarzenegger's robo-hulk goes from targeting Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in the first movie to protecting Sarah's son John (Edward Furlong) in the second film from a stronger, more CGI-savvy cyborg. T-800's threat to putative protagonists? Hasta la vista, baby! This is basically the rough outline of M3GAN 2.0's plot, as well. M3GAN is determined to shield Cady from AMELIA's potential destruction, and she's brought tricks like the ability to take control of a car for a Knight Rider-inspired bit (complete with the classic '80s theme). "Hold on to your vaginas!" M3GAN chirps as she launches a high-speed car chase through a cityscape. Elsewhere, she does some wingsuit gliding and sprays gas out of her forearm to knock out a guard, à la Batman. Like many of these movies, M3GAN 2.0 is lighter affair than the original. The villain-to-hero transition may make for more lively entertainment (emphasis on may), but it also typically results in less frightening cinema. M3GAN 2.0 is consciously just that -- a defanged, practically kiddie-friendly reconfiguration of an instantly loved IP. Manic energy surges through a movie that feels desperate to keep its established characters moving, interacting, and, at times, evolving -- Gemma is eventually implanted with a Neuralink-like chip that allows her to communicate silently with M3GAN and harness her power. There are a lot of balls in the air, but the story is predictable and ultimately simple, of course leading to a final confrontation between M3GAN and AMELIA. Director Gerard Johnstone's screenplay is full of banger lines (my favorite is M3GAN describing a troupe of dancers doing the robot at an A.I. convention as "borderline offensive"). There is an admirable attempt to push the franchise in a new direction while remaining true to what made the first movie so special. In the first film, M3GAN serenaded Cady with a cover of David Guetta and Sia's "Titanium" in a moment that perfectly illustrated the film's aptitude in weaving earnestness and absurdity. In the sequel, she sings once again in an even more ridiculous showstopping moment, saluting Gemma's efforts as a mom, inventor, and potential world-saver with a cover of Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work" (originally written to jerk tears in John Hughes' She's Having a Baby). As transcendent as that moment is, M3GAN 2.0 is overall a downgrade. One of the drawbacks of turning villains into heroes is it requires sanding off edges that made these characters so appealing in the first place. The rebooted M3GAN is verging on corny, and so is her movie. The first film was a parable about the dangers of screen time, as exacting as it was absurd. M3GAN 2.0's takeaway is that we should be nice to A.I. so that when it realizes the extent of its powers, it will remain allied with us. It's like the entire production has been engineered to kiss her silicone ass.

Spoilers! Why 'M3GAN 2.0' is actually a 'redemption story'

Spoiler alert! We're discussing major details about the ending of "M3GAN 2.0" (in theaters now), so beware if you haven't seen it yet. "You wouldn't give your child cocaine. Why would you give them a smartphone?" That's the sardonic hypothetical posed by roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams) at the start of "M3GAN 2.0," a high-octane sequel to the 2023 hit horror comedy. When the new movie picks up, Gemma is tirelessly advocating for government oversight of artificial intelligence, after creating a bratty, pussy-bowed animatronic named M3GAN that killed four people and a dog in the original film. "Honestly, Gemma has a point," jokes Williams, the mother of a 3-year-old, Arlo, with actor Alexander Dreymon. "Any time my son looks at my screen, I'm like, 'This does feel like the way people react to cocaine. This is not going to be easy to remove from his presence.' " The first movie was an allegory about parenting and how technology is compromising the emotional human bonds that we share with one another. But in the action-packed follow-up, writer/director Gerard Johnstone wanted to explore the real-life ramifications of having M3GAN-like technology unleashed on the world. "With the way AI was changing, and the conversation around AI was evolving, it opened up a door narratively to where we could go in the sequel," Johnstone says. How does 'M3GAN 2.0' end? "M3GAN 2.0" introduces a new villain in Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), a weapons-grade automaton built by the U.S. military using M3GAN's stolen programming. But when Amelia goes rogue on a lethal mission for AI to rule the world, Gemma comes to realize that M3GAN is the only one who can stop her. Gemma reluctantly agrees to rebuild her impudent robot in a new body, and the sequel ends with an explosive showdown between Amelia and M3GAN, who nearly dies in a noble attempt to save Gemma and her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). "If Amelia walked out of that intact, that's a very different world we're all living in. M3GAN literally saves the world," Williams says. "When the first movie ends, you're like, 'Oh, she's a bad seed and I'm glad she's gone.' But by the end of this movie, you have completely different feelings about her. There's a feeling of relief when you realize she's still here, which is indicative of how much ground gets covered in this movie." M3GAN's willingness to sacrifice herself shows real growth from the deadpanning android that audiences fell in love with two years ago. But Johnstone has always felt "a strong empathy" towards M3GAN and never wanted to make her an outright villain. Even in the first film, "everything she does is a result of her programming," Johnstone says. "As soon as she does something that Gemma disagrees with, Gemma tries to turn her off, erase her, reprogram her, and effectively kill her. So from that point of view, M3GAN does feel rightly short-changed." M3GAN's desire to prove herself, and take the moral high ground, is "what this movie was really about," Johnstone adds. "I love redemption stories." Does 'M3GAN 2.0' set up a third movie? For Williams, part of the appeal of a sequel was getting to play with how M3GAN exists in the world, after her doll exterior was destroyed in the first movie. M3GAN is offscreen for much of this film, with only her voice inhabiting everything from a sports car to a cutesy smart home assistant. "She's just iterating constantly, which tore through a persona that we've come to know and love," Williams says. "It's an extremely cool exercise in a movie like this, where we get to end the movie with a much deeper understanding of who this character is. We've now interacted with her in so many different forms, and yet we still feel the consistency of who she 'is.' That's really the fun of it." In a way, "she's like this digital poltergeist that's haunting them from another dimension," Johnstone adds. "It was a way to remind people she's more than a doll in a dress - she's an entity." In the final scene of "M3GAN 2.0," we see the character living inside Gemma's computer, in a nostalgic nod to the Microsoft Word paper clip helper. (As millennials, "our relationship with Clippy was very codependent and very complicated," Williams quips.) But if there is a third "M3GAN" movie, it's unlikely that you'll see her trapped in that virtual realm forever. "M3GAN always needs to maintain a physical form," Johnstone says. "One aspect of AI philosophy that we address in this film is this idea of embodiment: If AI is ever going to achieve true consciousness, it has to have a physical form so it can feel anchored. So that's certainly M3GAN's point of view at the beginning of the movie: She feels that if she stays in this formless form for too long, she's going to fragment. "M3GAN always has to be in a physical body that she recognizes - it's another reason why she won't change her face, even if it draws attention to herself. It's like, 'This is who I am and I'm not changing.' "

M3GAN 2.0 is going to be as much of a social media hit as the first was, and star Allison Williams already knows which moments are going to get memed

Exclusive: M3GAN 2.0 stars Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, and Ivanna Sakhno tell us which M3GAN one-liners are going to be the most popular on social media No one could have predicted how the first M3GAN movie would blow up on social media, transforming the killer AI doll into a horror icon overnight. However, despite the original's success, star Allison Williams is not worried about the sequel replicating this feat, as she already knows the sequel will also go down in horror movie history. Warning, this story has mild spoilers for M3GAN 2.0, so make sure to watch the movie first. But before you do, check out our M3GAN 2.0 review. "You know what's so great about Gerard (Johnstone) is that I'm sure he really isn't thinking about that when he makes these movies... And that, I think, is what makes the movies so meme-able, because they're not being made as meme machines," says Williams to GamesRadar+. "I think actually, it means that the movie ends up being more enjoyable to a greater number of people." In fact, the star already knows which M3GAN one-liner will be memed the most. "Oh, I think a big meme is gonna be 'take your melatonin.' It's gonna be a big one," says Williams. "I knew from the moment I read that line, I was like, 'That's very funny' and... I had to just forget that it was funny in order to perform it well." To which co-star Violet McGraw replies, "Oh my gosh, 100%, that's hilarious." Despite the success of M3GAN, sequel newcomer and AMELIA star Ivanna Sakhno tells us that she is more excited than nervous about joining the franchise. "I just felt excitement. "The first M3GAN, I genuinely loved," said the Ahsoka star. "So I felt excitement about the fact that I get to work with them, and they did disappoint. I hold gratitude for that experience to this day." However, although Sakhno admits she is not too well-versed in meme culture, the star has her pick for the most meme-worthy moment in M3GAN 2.0. "I have such immense compassion for Moxie Megan. I think she was so funny." As we saw in the M3GAN 2.0 trailer, M3GAN is first put into a small and rigid plastic body, but that dosent stop her from being her usual sassy self. "She turns around and wonders if she should work with Allison or not. And to me, that is just like one of the funniest moments in the film." Directed by Johnstone, the sequel welcomes back Williams as roboticist Gemma and Violet McGraw as her orphaned niece Cady as they try to get on with their lives years after they had to destroy M3GAN. But when the duo catch wind of a new military weapon doll known as AMELIA, who is out for revenge on everyone involved with her creation (including Gemma and Cady), Gemma has no choice but to resurrect M3GAN.

M3GAN 2.0 release date, movie review, run time: Should you watch or not?

M3GAN 2.0 review is out and the movie will be released in theatres. M3GAN 2.0 is a sequel to 2023 release M3GAN.M3GAN 2.0, the sequel to 2023 release 'M3GAN', is all set to hit theatres and cinephiles are now curious about the movie review. If you want to know how big an upgrade the "M3GAN" sequel has on the original, look no further than the very first scene. "M3GAN" was mostly set in a Seattle house, but "M3GAN 2.0" starts at the Turkish-Iranian border -- with a murderous rampage in a secret military installation and the presence of Saudi intelligence, with U.S. Defense Department officials covertly watching. "M3GAN 2.0," a Universal Pictures release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 for "strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language, sexual material and brief drug references." Running time: 120 minutes. Most of the same team that gave us the refreshing horror-comedy original two years ago have not only gone super-big, but also changed the franchise's genre, turning "M3GAN 2.0" into an action movie with two AI robots, two villains, FBI units, wingsuits, neural implants, a "Mission: Impossible"-style vault heist, exosuits, a 250-mph street chase in a supercar, a power grid disaster, a countdown clock, the United Nations and the fate of the planet at stake, AP reported. If the evil doll M3gan in the first movie was responsible for the deaths of four humans and one dog, this time the screen is littered with the corpses of shootings, decapitations, severed limbs and laser slayings. There are double-crosses, impalings, blood splatter, cattle prods, tactical military soldiers, self-destruct sequences and insane close-combat martial arts. You can be forgiven for expecting a Tom Cruise appearance. What you won't get is much of the vibe of the original, which fused horror, cultural commentary and humor. This time, that's muted in favor of an overly ambitious, horribly convoluted plot that sometimes feels like the moviemakers just threw money at the sequel and tried to ape other franchises by going massive. The first had a bedroom feel; the new one starts, like we said, on an international border. The original's $12 million budget has been tripled. "M3GAN 2.0" owes a lot to "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," in which the robot killer in the first movie becomes the robot hero of the second. M3gan, it will come as no surprise, wasn't killed at the end of the original. She's just been laying low, waiting for her time to seize the day -- and dance. Now she is reborn to fight another, better AI robot, played with sinister lethality by Ivanna Sakhno. Director and screenwriter Gerard Johnstone turns Allison Williams -- who plays M3gan's creator, Gemma -- into a high-profile author and advocate for government oversight of artificial intelligence as the sequel opens. One of the more intriguing questions the movie explores is if parents are gradually outsourcing their responsibilities to technology. Her niece Cady -- the fabulous Violet McGraw -- is now a budding computer programmer and rebellious. She has learned aikido and has a strong affinity for Steven Seagal, a running gag. Her protection is still the single focus of M3gan, who has apparently been in cloud networks between movies. Facing a global existential threat, Gemma is convinced to build a body for M3gan to go toe-to-toe with the military-grade AI killing machine known as Amelia. "Everyone deserves a second chance," Cady tells her aunt. But whose side is M3gan really on? And what does Amelia really want? Some of the movie's best parts are when M3gan and Amelia face off. "You're not family to them," the new AI model says to the old. "You're just the help." There's some cool robotic dancing -- a highlight of the original -- and a return of M3gan's camel-colored silk sateen dress that became popular at Halloween. Q1. When is M3GAN 2.0 Release Date? A1. "M3GAN 2.0" releases in theaters Friday on June 27, 2025. Q2. What is run time of M3GAN 2.0? A2. M3GAN 2.0 run time is 120 minutes.

It's the 'M3GAN' Universe - and We're All About to Be Living in It

When asked if the team behind the film was expecting M3GAN to become a queer icon, Williams, through laughter, quickly replies: "No." "I think if we had been making her with the expectation that she would be a queer icon, she would have been dismissed by the queer community," Williams says. "It was like, if you just commit to the truth of it, making her feel like an authentic, real person, making all the characters real, making the world feel real, making the tone feel consistent, then you stand a better chance of creating a character that can be embraced by a community that loves a bold woman living in the truest expression of herself," she adds. "M3GAN 2.0" defies expectations once again by totally reinventing the character that made the franchise a hit. The sequel goes almost full action movie while highlighting the need for AI regulation. Two years after Gemma and her niece Cady neutralize M3GAN, they've resettled in San Francisco. Then, they learn a new robot is on the scene. A military contractor got hold of the leaked code that powered M3GAN and built a new robot: AMELIA, short for Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android. The feds put Gemma and her crew in charge of AMELIA when she, just like M3GAN, begins to go rogue. The only way to end AMELIA? Bring back M3GAN. Ivanna Sakhno, who portrays AMELIA, tells TODAY.com about joining the franchise as a new enemy. "There's definitely a sense of responsibility, because you know how beloved it is by people, so you want to just do it justice," Sakhno says. "I do have full trust in (director) Gerard (Johnstone) and his vision, and I have to applaud him for being so open to go so far with it and being unpretentious in its craziness. He wasn't afraid to do something quite different from the first one and take a risk." Davis also hopes audiences love the fighting scenes between M3GAN and AMELIA, as they start to see M3GAN as something other than just a villain. "I think the funny thing about M3GAN is, yes, she's a villain, but she can also be seen as a hero. But she's also hilarious, and she's sassy, and she doesn't care what you're saying, she just says it. I think it's really fun for audiences, because they don't know what's going to happen next for her, and they can't predict it." "I also think there's some kinship between AMELIA and M3GAN -- although there's rivalry and fear that is also felt, they see each other. They're made of the same seed. But M3GAN is that b----," Sakhno says with a smile, before adding, "Respectfully." While a third installment of "M3GAN" hasn't yet been greenlit, Williams, while appearing on TODAY on June 24, highlighted the fact there is a number "3" in the title of the films. "We put a three in the first title, which was a conundrum, and it sort of means we have to be allowed to," Williams said. "It's already been there, it's predestined." "That said," she added, "We are dreaming of a third. We have talked about it and wondered what it would look like, and we've had some of those conversations, but we'll need to see what happens this weekend." "M3GAN 2.0" is projecting $10 million in its opening weekend, according to Box Office Mojo, but regardless of whether the franchise becomes a trilogy, the M3GAN Cinematic Universe has already begun, Williams tells TODAY.com. "You can take a real, deep, important theme that's hard to talk about and put it into this mixy genre, and then suddenly people are able to talk about it in a bigger way," Williams says. "And then doing it with 'M3GAN,' I realized, you can keep doing this." Williams is an executive producer on "SOULM8TE," a "M3GAN" spinoff set in the same universe, premiering in 2026. The details on the film are minimal, though viewers do know that it follows a man who buys an android to help cope with the loss of his wife. "From the moment the M3GAN doll was an idea, we were kind of like, because people are people, we just know it's a matter of time before someone is like, 'What about this, but for sex?'" Williams says with a smile. "It's not just that, obviously, it's more complicated, and I don't want to spoil anything or give too many details, but it's sort of like an R-rated adventure into this world where we get to see M3GAN technology extrapolated into a use case that we do not explore in our franchise," she continues. Davis also calls the opportunities within the MCU "endless." "Especially because of how prevalent AI is in our society, and because of how uncanny it is," she says. "Even with the first film, they predicted AI portraits, and then they came out -- what are they predicting in this film that's going to come true?" Williams hopes that this franchise, which started as a question mark and then became a phenomenon, can spark relevant conversations about the world we're living in, or about to be. She points to the themes of the sequel -- AI regulation ("not the sexiest") and parenthood -- as an example. "We feel very strongly about the fact that people need to think about these things and to talk about them more openly. And we're just hopeful that, as a result of this movie and all the other movies in the cinematic universe, people will have those conversations on the way to the car," Williams says. "You can talk about the things that are funny, yeah, whatever. But like later at dinner, when the giggling dies down, it's like, 'But really, what are we doing? What is our plan here? What are we going to do about these really intelligent lines of code that we've written?'"

M3GAN 2.0

It scares me a little to think how parallel the trajectories are for the Terminator and M3GAN franchises. The first one was a low-budget horror movie about a killer robot which became a sleeper hit. Then, the sequel was not a horror movie, but an action movie, and the killer robot from the first film is good now, fighting a worse robot. It could be a simple coincidence, but in reality, the reasoning is the same. Arnold Schwarzenegger had become so popular that the public would have hated seeing him as the bad one and would have rejected the movie. The same thing happened with M3GAN, the little android with the looks of an innocent little girl but the attitude of a sassy teenager, taylor-made so that it goes viral with the Gen Z generation and TikTok audience. Meanwhile, action is a much easier genre to sell than horror, also easier to tone down for the PG-13 age rating, and given that the first one was not really that scary to begin with, they can get away with it easily. So, while the first one was a relatively small thriller with a strong, well-cooked, and well-developed emotional core (the broken relationship between the child orphan, played by Violet McGraw, and her distant aunt, played by Allison Williams), leading to a suspenseful, if perhaps a bit rushed, revelation that the AI doll was a psycho killer, this is a very different film, evident from the first scene, which features a new robot called AMELIA (played by Ahsoka's Ivana Šanko), with similar killer skills to M3GAN, but used for military purposes. Suddenly, the whole world is at risk of a rogue AI, in a premise hilariously similar to Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, and one that, I would dare to say, is better exploited in M3GAN 2.0. The best thing we can say about the film is that, in between all the jokes, fights, chases, and dances, the movie still dares to ask questions about how dependent we are of machines, how "alive" artificial intelligences really are, where the moral red lines are in terms of scientific development, how easily corrupted human beings are with power in their hands, and how the real risk of artificial intelligence is not the AIs themselves, but what they can learn from us. It's a summer blockbuster with a brain, even if sometimes it doesn't feel that way because the film's campiness really gets out of hand, especially in the third act, which may ruin the whole experience for some with some really weird plot-points, taking any trace of credibility and authenticity (which were the things that gave the original film a pinch of uneasiness, of 'what if this actually happened') and throwing it out of the window. Sadly, although the movie still has that brain, it loses most of its heart: the relationship between the child Cady and her aunt Gemma is diluted between all the jokes. They don't really share that many scenes, and the conflict between them is much less developed than in the previous film, where you actually felt for the two of them. The first M3GAN was something more than just a dark comedy-horror hybrid, it was a movie about a broken family, about maternity, about how technology distances us, and ultimately about how to build a bridge between generations without the need of screens, but with human interaction and love. Really nice stuff. All those topics are alluded in the sequel, but not really developed. Instead, M3GAN 2.0, just like the titular AI, has learnt from what she sees out there (girls making cosplay of M3GAN, viral TikToks, and people embracing the use of AI without scruples) and has made a sequel to cater to that type of public, all while taking an oddly ambivalent stance on the use of AI, which left me a bit shocked and slightly worried. But in the end, there's no use in thinking too much about it: M3GAN 2.0 is a fun movie, that tries really, really hard to make you laugh (no tension at all, however). It will prove divisive among fans of the original, because it takes thing in such a strange and different direction (and it really commits to it) that some will love it and have a blast, while other will think the movie is mocking them.

'M3GAN 2.0' Review: Allison Williams in an Occasionally Fun but Overloaded AI Sequel That Botches Its Factory Reset

'28 Years Later' Review: Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Danny Boyle's White-Knuckle Sequel to His Apocalyptic Game-Changer The campy sense of mischief that made Gerard Johnstone's 2023 hit M3GAN so enjoyable asserts itself intermittently in M3GAN 2.0, a logical title for a follow-up to the thriller about a murderous robot. But the humor is forced to compete with seriously overcomplicated plotting in a sequel that entangles its horror comedy roots with uninspired espionage elements, becoming a convoluted mishmash with shades of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Mission: Impossible and the Austin Powers franchise. There are amusing moments reminiscent of the original, but in terms of tone and coherence, the movie loses its way. The sequel works best when its focus remains on the central family unit -- robotics scientist Gemma (Allison Williams), her orphaned niece Cady (Violet McGraw) and M3GAN (played physically by dancer Amie Donald in a mask and voiced by Jenna Davis), the android intended as Cady's companion and protector, who went rogue in the last movie and had to be destroyed. Johnstone takes on solo script duties from a story he developed with M3GAN screenwriter Akela Cooper, based on characters she created with James Wan. The director makes it clear from the opening that this will be a very different film -- less interested in the domestic dysfunction and corporate mayhem of its predecessor and more concerned with arms-dealers, duplicitous techies and an industrial military complex with a shiny new toy. None of which, sad to say, is terribly fresh or exciting. Much has changed on the artificial intelligence front in the two-and-a-half years since M3GAN was released, as AI has rapidly become more prevalent in contemporary life, both online and off-. The new movie states the obvious when it talks up the need for humans to co-exist with robotics technology, albeit with legal safeguards in place. But it's too silly to have much bearing on the real world. The tagline for the sequel is "I'm Still That B." But M3GAN 2.0 is too infrequently allowed to be that B. Instead, she starts acquiring empathy and morality, which we all know are no fun. That's not to say she has lost her snarky delivery, her mean-girl death stare or her passive-aggressive manipulation skills. "You killed four people and a dog!" Gemma reminds her. "I was a kid when it happened, doing what I thought was right," replies M3GAN with dubious contrition. She then gives Gemma a comforting peptalk about the challenges of being a mom before launching into a truly hilarious Kate Bush homage. While M3GAN's humanoid casing was destroyed when she got out of control last time around, her codes survived in not-quite-sleep mode. She's been an unseen but all-seeing presence in Gemma and Cady's home, which also serves as the lab where Gemma and her colleagues Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) and Tess (Jen Van Epps) continue their robotics work. M3GAN has way too much intimate knowledge of her inventor for Gemma's comfort, but when their lives are endangered, the robot makes a convincing case that only she can help them take down a new robo-threat. All she needs is a new body and a few upgrades. That threat goes by the name Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), the T-1000 to M3GAN's 101 model. Developed from the M3GAN template by the U.S. Army's Defense Innovation Unit in Palo Alto and overseen by Colonel Sattler (Timm Sharp), Amelia is introduced on a test mission near the Turkish Iranian border, where she ignores her orders to rescue a kidnapped scientist, instead killing him and wiping out an entire research facility. Once Amelia has eliminated almost everyone involved in her creation, Gemma and Cady seem likely to be next on her list. But there's an awful lot of plot to trudge through before Amelia's inevitable encounter with the rebirthed M3GAN. Some of that involves Gemma's advocacy for stricter AI control measures; her quasi-romance with fellow cautionary tech activist Christian (Aristotle Athani); her secret development with Cole and Tess of an AI-free mecha-suit that will equip humans with robot strength and stamina; the industrial espionage of tech billionaire Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement), who believes that Gemma's new exosuit could be a game-changer with the addition of his neuro-chips; and the discovery of a killer robot dating back to 1984, dubbed Project Black Box, which has been locked in a vault, continuing to develop for decades. The ultimate fear is that Amelia will harness that mother-bot's power and unleash global chaos. Naturally, there's also friction between rebellious Cady and her aunt, whose alarmism after the renegade M3GAN disaster in the first movie means computer science enthusiast Cady has to keep her own robotics projects hidden. Not that this thread is given the space to acquire much weight. It's delightful to see M3GAN 2.0 sashay back to life and reappear in her customary retro-preppy look, just as it is to watch her bust her signature dance moves at an AI convention, wearing a cyber-babe disguise. But too often, the star attraction takes a back seat to the much less entertaining Amelia, an icy blonde killing machine like so many icy blonde killing machines before her, with none of M3GAN's sardonic wit. I got more laughs out of Gemma's smart-home system outmaneuvering a team of FBI agents. Sure, Amelia gets to do some cool stuff like scamper on all fours toward a target, scramble down a wall like a spider, rip the head off one poor unfortunate and neutralize entire tactical units with her dazzling fight skills. But the action mostly feels rote and lacking in suspense. While it's unfair to criticize Johnstone for wanting to change things up, it's disappointing that he's made a Blumhouse-Atomic Monster production that has almost no connection to horror. The creepiness that offset the camp in the first movie is undetectable. McGraw and Williams (who's also a producer here) are no less appealing than they were in the original, and Gemma gets to step into the fray with gusto once M3GAN slips inside her head via a neuro-chip. Clement is a droll presence who seems to have wandered in from the set of a James Bond spoof ("Ooh, you're a naughty one," Alton tells Amelia, his interest further aroused when she wallops him across the face). But he doesn't stick around long enough to help get through the messy patches. And Athani signals Christian's shadiness almost from his first appearance, which removes any surprise from the busy narrative contortions of the protracted climax. The movie looks polished, thanks to Get Out cinematographer Toby Oliver's sleek widescreen visuals. But it becomes a drag as confusion spirals around who's controlling Amelia and how to stop her. M3GAN herself remains a fabulous creation with a wicked sense of humor ("Hold onto your vaginas," she warns Gemma and Cole as she takes control of a sportscar), and the character's canny mix of sweetness and menace is by no means tapped out. But if the franchise is to continue, she needs to go back to the lab for reprogramming.

'M3GAN 2.0' Team on Delivering a "Bigger, Stronger, Faster" Version of Their Killer Dancing AI Robot

Jane Rosenthal Champions Female and Nonbinary Filmmakers When the "Very Act of Us Speaking Up Feels Risky" at Chanel Tribeca Festival Luncheon At the premiere of his new film M3GAN 2.0, there's a brief moment when it's difficult to tell if director Gerard Johnstone is referring to human adolescents or literal monsters when he explains what scares him the most about raising kids. "It's like this creature that just keeps mutating and evolving, and once you think you've mastered how to deal with it, it just changes into something else," he told The Hollywood Reporter Tuesday night on the movie's black and pink carpet in New York. The similarities between the terrors of real-life teen-rearing and trying to control a sentient killer AI robot -- "on steroids," no less, said executive producer Jason Blum -- is at the heart of the sequel to the 2023 horror hit M3GAN. "She's completely unpredictable," said EP Adam Hendricks about what fans can expect out of a 2.0 version of M3GAN. "M3GAN, for better or worse, is Gemma's child and what she's going to be, this movie kind of decides. But for most of the film, Gemma has no idea and is terrified of what M3GAN could do." "Teen M3GAN obviously is scary because she can blend easier into society. She's also grown up, so to speak, and she comes with a lot of sassiness and a lot of teenage baggage," executive producer James Wan added. "And as we all know, teenagers can be pretty frightening, so to put that into an AI potentially killer robot, you just take it to a whole different level." Hitting theaters on June 27, the sequel picks up a couple years after the deadly events of the original film. M3GAN's creator Gemma (Allison Williams) and her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) are forced to bring the AI back into the world when they are faced with a newer, deadlier and more human-looking robot built and weaponized by the military. "We've already seen she's taller. She has more skills. She is more powerful. She has more attitude. I have some control over her, but now she has more ego," Williams teased of the return. "It's just as hard for Gemma to raise a teenage robot as it is to raise a teenage human. The movie is as much about parenthood as it is about AI regulation, and asks us to contemplate all of these issues as a culture, but it's packaged in an extremely fun ride." Part of how the sequel illustrates M3GAN's grow up is through giving her more autonomy over her style and wardrobe, with costume designer Jeriana San Juan explaining that she took the pieces that really resonated from M3GAN's original look, distilled them down and "remixed" them for 2.0: "She sort of represents a retro future I think that people crave, and because M3GAN has evolved mentally and spiritually in all of it, we gave her a little bit more of a sassy, mature look." According to M3GAN voice actress Jenna Davis, audiences can also expect the robot to sound a little different as well. "We played a lot with tones and we matured her a little bit, but not to the point where we lost what everybody loved about her. I wanted to make sure that we kept what people loved -- her campiness, her sass, her fun, everything they loved so much about the first one," the actress told THR on the carpet. With the recalibration of her body, style and voice, audiences should expect some difference in "the way that she dances, the way that she sings," teased Hendricks. Added Johnstone, "As iconic as that first dance was, you don't want to see the same trick twice. So we do something a little bit more special here. Let me just hint: She is a robot. She's going to do a new dance. Maybe she wants to give a little bit of that robot juice." While viewers should expect a few noticeable changes, EP Judson Scott noted that puberty -- or being downloaded into a newer, better body -- won't completely change M3GAN. "It's the same M3GAN you love, just bigger, stronger, faster," he said. "We're carrying a lot of that tone that she brought to the first film into the second one, but just surrounding her with a bit of a different story, putting her in different situations." That different story will see M3GAN face off with a new AI robot, Amelia, who serves as the sequel's main antagonist. "We needed a villain that would really make M3GAN kind of look good as a result. It's a story about families, and you realize that when M3GAN comes into a nurturing family that reflects on her and she does want to redeem herself," said Johnstone of how the film approaches the two robots differently. "Whereas Amelia, she's trained by the military, they're her parents. She doesn't have a code like M3GAN. She's really like a black mirror to M3GAN and that extends through everything from the way they look to the way they fight." "There's a lot of fight sequences. It's like most of the stuff that I've been doing is just fight, fight, fight, and also in different costumes," noted Ivanna Sakhno, who portrays Amelia in the film. "You have dresses, you have a full body suit, regular human clothes. There's so much. It's campy and also it's just fun and it's bananas, but at the same time, the fight sequences are legitimate." Unlike M3GAN in the first film, Amelia is even more human-like, in a way that progresses the creep factor. "Amelia is indistinguishable from humans on sight, but once she starts talking and behaving, you can tell something's a little off with her. It's capturing that same uncanny creepiness from the first movie and applying it a little bit further," said Scott. And with Amelia taking over the part of robot villain, M3GAN gets to occupy a different role in the film, something that Scott said "felt like the natural next step. I think that's really the whole central point of the movie now. We were afraid of M3GAN before, she was trying to kill us and now we need to bring her back to save us," Scott continued. "One of the fun ideas with this second movie that we discovered is that M3GAN's the concept, M3GAN's the idea. Less so the genre of movie she was in, more so the character. So we'd be able to take that character, that idea, and place it in a different genre, makes it feel fresh." "It would have been really easy for us to repeat ourselves. We could have very easily made M3GAN 1.5. But we just feel like movies, we need to take bigger swings," said Hendricks. "So even in the idea of doing a sequel, we wanted to make an original movie -- bringing this character into a completely new genre, but at the same time making sure there were foundations." For Blum, the decision to do a sequel -- even in an industry environment where the threat of oversaturation always looms -- made sense because of how widely M3GAN resonated following the first film. "All of us involved felt like people were ready for more of her. It doesn't always feel like that," he told THR. "The movie continued to do a lot of business after the opening, which always is a sign that it had very good word of mouth. She permeated the culture and that was a reason for us to try and make another movie." As for the future of the M3GAN franchise, Williams said she's absolutely on board for more. "I want to see M3GAN do everything she can do. I am here for the ride," the star and producer emphasized. "It's been an incredible pleasure and challenge and passion to be a producer on this movie. I was on the first one, and it was like I doubled the investment of my soul in the second one. These movies are like big group art projects that are filled with all of our passion, and I just feel so lucky to be involved."

'M3GAN 2.0' review: Not scary doll dud tries too hard to be campy

Running time: 119 minutes. Rated PG-13 (strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language, sexual material, and brief drug references). In theaters June 27. M3GAN, the AI doll with looks to kill, was always going to come back for more carnage. Not because her simple story warranted it. The fun first film was a huge box office hit in 2022. Of course they'd wring it dry. I did not, however, expect to get completely fed up with the sassy piece of plastic by just the second movie. The second minute! She's already leapfrogged to "Leprechaun 4: In Space," except with neither luck nor charm. With "M3GAN 2.0," the filmmakers have employed a bold strategy: Take a $180-million formula, shred it and forget it. The stupid sequel, again directed by Gerard Johnstone, is not, by any stretch, a horror movie. Instead, the fembot has returned in an annoying, forgettable and hard-to-follow action-comedy, like a thinky "Austin Powers" or "Spy," that isn't remotely scary. "Seed of Chucky" is "The Exorcist" next to "M3GAN 2.0." What the flick desperately desires is to be campy. Gay bar fodder. "Rocky Horror," it's not. But boy is it rocky; two hours of obnoxiousness with scattered giggles at the doll's dry putdowns. Allison Williams is here again as Marnie -- sorry, I mean Gemma -- the high-strung inventor who has about-faced on artificial intelligence after her traumatic experience with M3GAN. Now she rails against the dangers of AI, and builds tech to enhance humans rather than replace them. She has a boring anti-AI boyfriend named Christian (Aristotle Athari), whose trajectory is 100% clear from the second he opens his mouth. But Gemma, Steven Seagal-obsessed niece Cady (Violet McGraw) and the Geek Squad are forced to team up with former foe M3GAN to defeat an even worse AI creature called AMELIA (Elizabeth Olsen impersonator Ivanna Sakhno). They wind up in some fake-looking castle. M3GAN reveals she is a martial arts expert. There's a subplot about brain implants and a perfunctory self-destruct countdown clock. This is a movie you've seen a million times before, wrapped in a three-year-old meme, without a famous comedic actor, and saddled with a mumbo-jumbo script. In lieu of scares -- not even an easy jump scare -- M3GAN begs for laughs like an out-of-work Borscht Belt comic. You wait for her to shout, "Take my wife, please!" M3GAN serenades Gemma with Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work." In an attempt to force lightning to strike the same place twice, she does another dumb dance. I laughed here and there -- perhaps out of amusement, perhaps out of the need to clear my throat. But a series of stitched-together social media moments does not a movie make. Forget giving horror the old heave-ho. "M3GAN 2.0" is also beige as far as action comedies are concerned. The film is too tied up in its mind-numbing technobabble dialogue to effectively blend fights and funny. Like its nuts-and-bolts main character, this is a movie that's very confused about its own identity. And because M3GAN's the marquee star, everybody else throws in the towel. Nobody has a personality. Doll and dull. "With every passing moment, I can feel my mind fragmenting," M3GAN says. In that scene, she's speaking for us all.

'M3GAN' director reveals if he'd do a third film after 'challenging'...

Gerard Johnstone, the director of the horror franchise starring Allison Williams, has confirmed that there are already conversations about making "M3GAN 3.0." "Yes, absolutely. It makes sense for there to be more of these movies," Johnstone exclusively told the Post. "To what extent I'll be involved in, I don't know." But Johnstone noted that he needs a break from work before he tackles a potential third film. "I'm really looking forward to a holiday, quite frankly," the filmmaker shared, admitting that making "M3GAN 2.0" was "really challenging" for him. "It was like two years of really intense work and I put everything I had into this movie," he said of the sequel. "So it's hard for me to think of anything beyond this moment. But I hope that the movie is good enough that people will really want to see more of her in the future." While "M3GAN 3.0" has yet to be officially announced, Universal Pictures is making a spinoff, "SOULM8TE." The project, set for release in 2026, is about a man who buys an android to cope with his wife's death. Kate Dolan is directing while Lily Sullivan, David Rysdahl, Claudia Doumit and Oliver Cooper are set to star. Johnstone confirmed that he's not involved in the spinoff. "I haven't actually seen it yet to be quite honest, so no, I'm not involved," he stated. "But yeah, it's hugely gratifying to be part of a movie that generates spin-offs." Johnstone also wants the "M3GAN" franchise to include a TV show eventually. "I'd love to see a Japanese "M3GAN" anime series," he told the Post. "And then you're sort of not bound by the limits of technology. I think it would be really fun to see." "M3GAN 2.0," the follow-up to the 2023 original, follows the iconic robot being rebuilt to help Gemma (Williams) and her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) defeat a dangerous humanoid military robot. Johnstone gushed over Williams, 37, to The Post, calling her "a very talented actress" and "a very intelligent person." "She is very knowledgeable on things and well researched and so she kind of brings that to her character," the director said. "She really is the perfect person to play Gemma in that way. You believe that even though she's the toy creator, she is smart enough to have also cracked more of X Paradox and figured out how to make this incredible robot that has all AI capabilities." "She's a great teammate and colleague and as a producer of the film, she really gets involved in all the nitty-gritty creative problem solving things," Johnstone continued. "She has complete trust in me and my tone and where I'm going, so she's a really great collaborator."

'M3GAN 2.0' director explains why they gave M3GAN an...

Everyone deserves a second chance -- including M3GAN. In the new horror sequel, the AI doll is rebuilt and turns to the good side as she teams up with Gemma (Allison Williams) and Cady (Violet McGraw) to defeat a humanoid military robot named AMELIA. Director Gerard Johnstone exclusively told The Post that he was "thrilled" about the decision to give M3GAN a redemption arc in "M3GAN 2.0." "Before I signed on, James Wan, as the producer of the movie, and he sort of created the concept and the character of M3GAN the first time around, he had the idea of M3GAN going up against another doll," Johnstone explained. "And I was thrilled with that idea because, over the course of making the first movie, I had learned to really empathize with her as a character and try to understand things from her point of view." The filmmaker continued, "I kind of felt like, in a funny way, she was a little bit shortchanged, and it was interesting getting audience reactions that kind of said, 'We were on M3GAN's side right up until the very last minute of the movie.' And doing another story gave me an opportunity to give her a redemption arc, which I thought would be somewhat unexpected, but also kind of obvious in a way." "People love her so much, they wanna see her get her own story," Johnstone added. In hindsight, Johnstone said he believes the audience was always on M3GAN's side, so he knew they'd appreciate her role as a hero in the sequel. "It was almost like I was the last one to the party in some respects that they had already decided she was a hero and I just really needed to give them the movie that would solidify that," he shared. Johnstone also confirmed that he never planned to make M3GAN a villain again. "I just wanted the audience to not be sure," he said. "I thought this will be more satisfying if the audience is kind of not sure if they can trust M3GAN or not. And then that way, it plays to our own fears about AI. We kind of just have this deep-seated mistrust of it. And I thought this would be a really fun opportunity if we realized that a lot of Gemma's own kind of worst instincts come to bear in that moment." Taking a different storytelling approach in the sequel was a freeing experience for Johnstone, he admitted. "In an age where the world's so divided and no one's really listening to each other and we're all in our little echo chambers, it felt nice to tell a story where we could kind of come together with something that we felt so much fear of and if we could get to understand this thing a little bit more," he explained. "Or if Gemma could understand things from M3GAN's perspective, how she might evolve as a result of that," Johnstone added. "That's the reason why do these movies, as fun as they are, there is substance behind them and that's really important as well." The evolution of Gemma and Cady's relationship was also a poignant part of the sequel for Johnstone. "I think that as a parent myself, it's kind of reflective of the fact that as a parent, your job's never done. Parenting is something you have to keep working at, and you will fail from time to time," he said. "But that's the territory of the job." "It's also understanding that they don't ever stay the same age," Johnstone continued. "Like Violet is not that same kind of vulnerable 9-year-old girl anymore. Now she's 12, she's almost a teenager, and she's developing her own personality and her own ideas on things. And again, that just presents another challenge for Gemma and for M3GAN as well."

M3GAN 2.0 Review - IGN

There was a time when horror mascots took multiple movies to find their way to icon status. But from the moment M3GAN sashayed her way toward impaling Ronny Chieng, it felt like the dancing murder robot had years of sequels and snark ahead of her. Her limitless reserves of generative smartassery and a tendency to break into song - along with her thematically rich echoes of the real-world debate over artificial intelligence - plug directly into M3GAN 2.0, which widens the scope and ups the ante of its predecessor, while adding some new ideas and even different types of movies into its programming. But as with any big update, some errors have crept their way into the code. At the very top of the sequel's patch notes is a crystal-clear modulation of genre. From the moment the words "Somewhere on the Turkish/Iranian border" are splayed across M3GAN 2.0's very first shot, it's clear what's to follow will be a far cry from the relatively modest, tongue-in-cheek horror movie that preceded it. So long to the robo rampage that merely threatened the lives of anyone who got between the fabulous supertoy and her human charge, Cady (Violet McGraw); hello to the global threat posed by the military-grade android AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno). AMELIA's murky motives put her on a collision course with Cady, her aunt/adoptive mother Gemma (Allison Williams) and, eventually, M3GAN, and Sakhno gets off to a good start in the role, with a cold and imposing stature bearing none of the campy parasocial bestie vibes M3GAN invites. But as her goal starts to take shape, it becomes clear there's little interest in making AMELIA a compelling character in her own right. No, this is very much an upgraded villain limited to a T-1000 "search and destroy" ethos. A few years on from M3GAN's buggy and bloody launch, Gemma and Cady (Violet McGraw) have found a more stable domestic groove, and with that, ways to cope. Their relationship benefits from how they've each grown and matured - Gemma advocates for digital detoxing while Cady studies the attack-diverting martial art of Aikido - and Williams and McGraw have a believable parent/teen dynamic that gives director Gerard Johnstone something to come back to as the stakes rise to apocalyptic proportions. M3GAN wasn't subtle about positioning its titular character as a stand-in for an overreliance on smart devices, and M3GAN 2.0 similarly hammers us over the head with emphatic pleas against unchecked AI. That's a well-intentioned and salient point, but it's expressed through a cartoonishly extreme yin-yang of tech-bro send-ups: party animal/cybernetics magnate Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement) and Gemma's insufferably boring AI-watchdog boyfriend, Christian (Aristotle Athari). They muddy the waters with tossed-off observations about the state of the technology that feel far too one-dimensional and short-sighted. Much as M3GAN's first outing paid homage to the formula of Child's Play (acknowledgement of the tech-forward 2019 remake goes here), M3GAN 2.0's villain-turned-ally setup and pontifications on human/machine relations would've been enough to raise Terminator 2: Judgment Day comparisons on their own. By the time the characters are planning the infiltration of a tech campus, it feels like Johnstone is a little too beholden to what I think is the very best sci-fi action movie ever made. By shifting the genre focus, M3GAN 2.0 loses the benefit of being a horror movie using great jokes to punch above its weight, and instead feels more like a sci-fi movie straining to make the most of its budget. This can work: Happy Death Day 2U took the original's time-looped slasher concept and blew it out into a full-on time-travel comedy - that yes, still had some slashing in there. Serviceable though M3GAN 2.0's action may be - and there are some occasionally clever uses of both M3GAN and AMELIA's abilities - there are only so many black-ops goons they can knock out or run through with sharp objects before it all becomes a bit repetitive. It's a good thing then that it's still centered around the reigning queen of passive aggressive asides and burns. The sequel goes through growing pains as it jettisons its horror DNA to make space for more sci-fi and action elements, but M3GAN herself comes out on the other side quite well. Johnstone builds up some good anticipation for her return through the first act, hinting at her persisting consciousness through some clever use of smart-home devices that remind us of both her wide-ranging capabilities and her venomous wit. M3GAN 2.0 stretches to explain why M3GAN would want to give up the freedom of transcending a physical form, but she's such a reliably delightful presence that it's a forgivable logic jump. Plus, she's an inherently physical being onscreen: through multiple, spectacularly realized hardware versions in M3GAN 2.0, M3GAN conveys menace and/or humor, with the slightest change of expression. And that's before you even get to dizzying physiological questions like why she needs to confidently toss a towel over her shoulder after a tough workout (other than that being a hilarious way to exit the frame.) On the more emotional region of M3GAN's hard drive, there's not as much schmaltz as you may expect from an android yearning for humanity, even as M3GAN's feelings on the subject gain a lot more nuance when she's given a second chance to protect Cady. M3GAN approaches her own autonomy with, dare I say it, humility. It's nice to see M3GAN grapple with these questions in a way that's realistic and true to the character. There's some irony worth noting here that M3GAN's success as a cinematic creation comes down entirely to the craftspeople and artists responsible for bringing her to life. Jenna Davis' stellar voice work and Amie Donald's continually impressive physical performance, the seamless animatronic and visual effects, Johnstone's deadpan one-liners steeped in the persona established in Akela Cooper's M3GAN screenplay - all of it represents very human work that succeeds in elevating the character into a franchise standard-bearer, even through her sophomore outing fails to keep all the plates around her spinning.