Only one other person attended our screening of M3gan 2.0 and their response to the film offers the most authentic take. After spending the first quarter of the movie on their phone and guffawing at either whatever reel they were watching or some of the more obvious punchlines in the movie, they had their fill. No, dear reader, they did not walk out, yet. First, they laid down in the aisle using their sweater as a pillow, and snored. After a good Power Nap, they hopped up and walked off, with a good half hour left in the movie. They had the best M3gan 2.0 experience anyone will have.
Except my daughter, maybe, who is new to horror movies that are not animated, and was relieved there wasn’t any horror in this one. What happens is almost literally akin to the progression from Terminator (1984) to Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), in terms of escalation of core plot concepts (even burrowing what happens in T2), but with no relationship to the increase in quality.
This is not to suggest M3gan is an untouchable mould for a slasher, like Terminator is, nor that Gerard Johnston necessarily has James Cameron’s directing chops. It’s not and he doesn’t.
As horror shifts away from the bread and butter of what Blumhouse have built their whole brand upon, the company and its leaders seem to be at a loss. In an interview on the industry tea leaves podcast The Town with Matthew Belloni, Jason Blum startlingly takes accountability. “We thought M3gan was Superman,” he defends, that the success-by-virility of M3gan in January of 2021 would produce the same results, if pitted against the Summer’s first wave of serious blockbusters.
And, no. No, it doesn’t work like that. A fun, topical slasher is the Juice of January. It doesn’t work, releasing next to a serious and super-thoughtful horror movie, like 28 Years Later. Worse, it’s no longer much of a horror movie, moving closer to a blend of action-comedy. The impulses of an action-comedy, though, operate on a different wavelength than what horror does, and the movie hasn’t adapted. So, it’s not going to be any mark on the new Superman, either.
The corporate want to go viral does not clearly understand why these things happen. It’s funny that M3gan does a dance and song number in a horror movie. Usually that doesn’t happen and killer dolls don’t do that. They have now, so it’s not funny when she does again, in an action-comedy with less interesting action and somehow fewer laughs.
The Blumhouse strategy is wavering because the market is wavering. As Jason Blum notes in the podcast, you can’t just make Get Out (2017) for a few million and make bank, because that’s not how audiences attach to things. They respond to authenticity. Were Get Out designed to make money without a budget, it also wouldn’t have made money then.
This is what happens to almost every film company. They get rich by doing the right, best thing, then they need to repeat that trick, but it’s not repeatable. That’s why A24 and Neon have become the industry leaders in the genre and Blumhouse have fallen to the back. A24 and Neon understand you have to make the market but once they have, they go make another market. They do not serve the same market slop and hope for better results.
The audience is not stupid; they are tired. If you serve them meaningless slop, they might just sleep in the aisles.