Jason Blum has admitted trying to make M3GAN “like superman” was a mistake.
The 56-year-old Blumhouse founder and CEO has reflected on the studio’s mistakes with M3GAN 2.0 after the sequel opened to $17 million at the worldwide box office, after originally being projected to open at $45 million and then $30 million.
Blum told The Town podcast: “I was upset.”
The producer, who insisted he was in a “death spiral of depression” before seeing the final amount, opened up on how the studio mishandled the follow-up to the 2022 horror blockbuster, which opened to $30.4 million.
He said: “We all thought M3GAN was like Superman — we could do anything to her. We could change genres, we could put her in the summer, we could make her look different, we could turn her from a bad guy into a good guy.
“And we kind of classically overthought how powerful people’s engagement was, really, with her.”
He noted that there were more issues than the misguided genre-swap to more of an action comedy, and a summer release.
Blum explained that director Gerard Johnstone “s someone who could solve almost anything you throw at him, but needs time.”
He added: “He’s just one of those directors that needs a lot of time. And on the first M3GAN, he had all the time in the world.
“I don’t think we even had a release date until the movie got finished.
“And on this, again, we’ve gone over our skis too far, summer movie, change the genre, set the date. We got too excited by M3GAN, and she didn’t work.”
In the follow-up film, M3GAN has to be rebuilt by her creator Gemma (Allison Williams) to battle a self-aware military robot called AMELIA intent on an AI takeover.
Johnstone recently insisted it was always his intention for the M3GAN robot to never do anything heinously evil in the original film, but only what she was programmed to do to protect Gemma’s orphaned niece Cady (Violent McGraw), with murderous consequences, which allowed him to let audiences give her a second chance.
In an interview with The AU Review, he said: “When I was working on the first movie, I was always very careful not to have her do anything that felt just malicious or evil.
“I really felt like I empathized with this character. That she was doing what she was programmed to do, and I never betrayed that.”
Despite Blum’s comments, Johnstone had insisted he was aware that M3GAN is a horror and gay icon thanks to the 2022 film, and had promised that his new movie sees her do everything that made audiences fall in love with her.
Revealing his “mission statement,” he said: “To give audiences the best movie and to present the character in the best way. To utilize all the things she does as a character that made people fall in love with her in the first place, but in surprising ways.”
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