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Good news! Since we were all so obnoxiously loud about how much we loved seeing a sentient version of the cursed “Twilight” Renesmee baby robot doing aerial flips down a hallway in the trailer for Universal, Blumhouse, and Atomic Monster’s “M3GAN,” the film is coming out even earlier than anticipated.
Blumhouse has a consistently solid track record for their horror releases, with both legacy projects like the extremely polarizing “Halloween Ends” and originals like “The Black Phone.” The upcoming “M3GAN” is a new original film for the house that Blum built, and if it’s as profitable as the constant trending Tweets would lead us to believe it’ll be, the company may be looking at a new franchise to join “Paranormal Activity,” “The Purge,” and “Insidious.”
While we anxiously await the film’s release next year, here’s all that you need to know about “M3GAN,” and more.
M3GAN release date and where to watch it
Initially scheduled for release on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, “M3GAN” will continue the lineage of killer doll movies a week earlier, and is now slated for a January 6, 2023, theatrical release date. This puts “M3GAN” against Sony’s currently untitled “true haunting” film, but takes it out of the opening weekend competition against “House Party” and “A Man Called Otto.”
What’s M3GAN about?
If you’re hoping for the second coming of a film like “Annabelle,” you may want to look elsewhere, as “M3GAN” looks to be bringing a similar flavor of camp ridiculous as the current season of “Chucky.” The film focuses on a young roboticist named Gemma who is hard at work on a life-like A.I. doll that’s “programmed to be a child’s greatest companion and a parent’s greatest ally,” as the film’s trailer described it. As Gemma enters crunch time trying to complete her work on the prototype, she suddenly becomes the new guardian of her recently orphaned eight-year-old niece, Cady.
Having never anticipated becoming a parental figure, Gemma decides to treat her niece as the perfect living test subject, introducing the M3GAN doll to Cady as a means to try the prototype out on a human child and give Cady a new companion to help her through this hardship. Cady and M3GAN bond immediately, but the overprotective nature of the A.I. quickly turns into every terrifying robot story ever told, and M3GAN begins taking out anyone that gets in the way of her and Cady’s happiness or relationship.
M3GAN has the attitude and killer instincts of Chucky with the unsettling pop sensibilities of the Ashley-O/Miley Cyrus doll from “Black Mirror,” and based on the trailer, looks to be one hell of a wild ride.
The cast of M3GAN
“M3GAN” sees Allison Williams’ return to Blumhouse after her starring role in “Get Out,” playing the protagonist Gemma. Young Cady is played by Violet McGraw, who horror fans may recognize for her work as Young Nell in Mike Flanagan’s “The Haunting of Hill House.” Amie Donald will perform as the physical form of the M3GAN doll, with “Infinity Train” star Kimberley Crossman providing her uncanny human voice. The film also features performances by Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jen Van Epps, Arlo Green, Kira Josephson, Jack Cassidy, Michael Saccente, Stephane Garneau-Monten, and “The Daily Show” correspondent Ronny Chieng.
The creative team behind M3GAN and more
The most exciting aspect of “M3GAN” arguably lies with the creative team, which is, as we called it, a certifiable dream team. The film is being directed by Gerard Johnstone, a filmmaker out of New Zealand who helmed one of the most underrated horror comedies of the last ten years, the haunted house flick “Housebound.” A return to horror from Johnstone is long overdue, and the team he’s joined to make it happen is so perfectly aligned it feels impossible.
“M3GAN” comes from Akela Cooper, the maniacal genius behind James Wan’s “Malignant,” the horror film that I absolutely credit as reminding countless horror fans that life is a beautiful mess worth experiencing when the pandemic blues had many contemplating the absolute worst. Cooper is also a co-executive producer on “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” a supervising producer on “Luke Cage” and “American Horror Story,” co-wrote the theme park horror film “Hell Fest,” and has been slated to write the screenplay for “The Nun 2.”
And to make the deal even sweeter, modern horror maestro James Wan is producing, because after the last few years of existing on this bleak, mortal plane, we deserve something fun, scary, and absurd.
