After a dismal opening weekend, it’s official: “M3GAN 2.0” is a flop, at least critically, and Blumhouse‘s fourth straight poor showing at the box office in 2025. Maybe Jason Blum expected fare like Leigh Whannel‘s “Wolf Man” or Jaime Collet-Serra‘s “The Woman In The Yard” to fail, but the much-awaited sequel to the small studio’s 2023 smash hit? That must feel like a gut punch.
But THR reports (via an interview Blum had on “The Town” with Matt Belloni) that hope isn’t lost in the house that Blum built. While its opening weekend numbers aren’t as impressive as “M3GAN” ($30.4 million domestically off a $12 million budget, with $181.7 million globally over its entire run; “M3GAN 2.0” took in $17 million globally with a $25 million budget), the sequel should break even by the time it leaves theaters, and no one at Blumhouse is panicking. The comparatively poor numbers come more from director Gerard Johnstone taking a big swing veering the sequel in a much different direction than critics and audiences expected, leaving viewers mostly puzzled.
“We all thought Megan was like Superman,” Blum said of the sequel’s pivot toward sci-fi action and the original’s roots in ’90s DTV screener fare. “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 classically overthought how powerful people’s engagement was with her.”
Blume also stressed that the audience wasn’t prepared for the genre-swap bait-and-switch of”M3GAN 2.0.” Fans of the 2023 film expected another silly and violent thriller about a queer-coded killer robot. Instead, Blumhouse supplied a “big-budget” sequel akin to “T2: Judgment Day” making M3GAN the protagonist, complete with dopey, prescient commentary on the ethical implications of AI. Throw in a lot of Steven Segal references, and this is about the last thing some “M3GAN” fans expected to hit theaters on the last weekend of Pride Month.
Blum admitted to being in “pain” over the weekend as box office numbers for “M3GAN 2.0” came in, although insiders may have seen its failure coming from a mile away. A horror produced that talked to THR said “[Blumhouse] thought they were being all clever changing the dates and the genres,” alluding to the studio pushing the sequel from its original January 17 release date to June 27. Another said, “This was not the sequel audiences wanted. It was the movie that the director wanted.” Fair enough, but credit to Johnstone for taking a risk. Blumhouse’s entire enterprise rests on giving genre directors a chance to flex their creativity on small/mid-budget projects. Even if audiences loathe “M3GAN 2.0,” Johnstone followed the studio’s ethos to a tee with his follow-up, and he deserves a lot of credit for taking his creation into uncharted, or at least unexpected territory.
The thing is, Blumhouse’s model allows some lulls like the one they’ve had so far this year. Jason Blum doesn’t expect every film his studio makes to be the next “Paranormal Activity” or “The Conjuring,” let alone the next “M3GAN.” But the revenue return from surprise successes like those allows Blum and filmmakers like Johnstone to take big swings on a modest budget. And if the movie flops, like “M3GAN 2.0”? Well, the sunk cost of a $25 million budget isn’t too bad in the grand scheme of things. Since its founding in 2002, Blumhouse has made $6 billion at the box office across 42 releases: that’s nearly $143 million in gross per movie, an excellent business model. As another Hollywood insider told THR: “We would be having a different conversation if they weren’t responsible. At the end of the day, every one of these movies will make money.”
So, maybe “M3GAN 2.0” wasn’t the movie audiences expected it to be, and it won’t be the surprise box office juggernaut that the 2023 film was. So what? In Blumhouse’s big picture, the sequel’s failure and their initial 2025 slump are but a blip in an otherwise successful two decades of making mid-budget genre fare. And while M3GAN in “M3GAN 2.0” may not be the same queer icon and legend she was in the first movie, the robot is still very much of “the moment,” providing intriguing commentary on the future of AI in a way that only schlock like the sequel is capable of. So take the misfire of “M3GAN 2.0” in stride, Mr. Blum: with the cinematic game you play, you’re bound to strike genre gold again soon enough.
