Glowing reviews, viral dance routines, and all the makings of a gay icon.
M3GAN managed to defy the odds to turn her meme-worthy status into a box office hit.
If expectations for "M3GAN" were low, a big part of that might have been due to
its release date. Over the years, January has become a dumping ground for films that
the studios don't have much faith in. While bad weather often keeps moviegoers home,
financial belt-tightening after the expensive holiday season is also a factor. Plus,
with the last of December's prestige pictures going into wide release, it's become a truism
that January is the time studios release bombs and stinkers without anyone paying too much attention.
But as with every rule, there are exceptions. For instance, in the midst of the January doldrums,
Liam Neeson staked out a claim in the 2010s with his particular brand of grizzled thrillers.
And while the month is often a graveyard of dreadful comedies and franchise non-starters,
it has also debuted its share of influential and innovative horror films, from Robert Rodriguez's
"From Dusk Till Dawn" to the first entries in the "Hostel" and "Cloverfield" series.
In the first weekend of January 2023, James Cameron's juggernaut sequel "Avatar:
The Way of Water" continued to dominate the U.S. box office for the fourth week in a row. However,
the number two spot was claimed by "M3GAN," the James Wan-produced horror flick about a
young orphan whose roboticist aunt gives her an advanced android made to look and
act like a preteen girl. Cady and her new robot best friend, nicknamed M3GAN,
quickly become inseparable. However, M3GAN soon takes her programming imperative,
to protect Cady from all physical and emotional dangers, to its violent, logical endpoint.
The film had made a splash months earlier with a marketing campaign that left audiences
confused as to what kind of movie "M3gan" really was. Viewers seemingly weren't sure
whether "M3gan" was a horror film, a comedy, or something in between. The movie's singing
and dancing homicidal robot had all the makings of a camp icon, but could just
have easily been a disaster in the making. It turns out, the movie knows exactly what it is,
which is a slick reinvention of the killer doll movie that doesn't so much toe the line
between silly and scary as dance and twirl all over it. Strong reviews, good word of mouth,
and an inescapable online marketing campaign helped put a $12 million scary movie within
spitting distance of one of the biggest films of all time. "M3GAN" quickly swiveled from
being a potential bomb to possibly one of the biggest horror films of the year.
Befitting the month of its release, "M3GAN" also sits at the nexus of several horror trends that
don't always have a track record for quality. On its surface, the film belongs squarely in
the "killer doll" genre, home of "Annabelle" and the "Child's Play" series, where children's
playthings have minds of their own. Of course, this usually happens via supernatural means,
but M3GAN isn't possessed by a malevolent spirit the way Annabelle and Chucky are. Instead,
her evil is born of microchips, wires, and humankind's hubris, which also puts
the film in the "killer robot" category. Like the cowboy robots of the original "Westworld,"
M3GAN obeys her programming to a troubling degree, and like Arnold Schwarzenegger's
reformed cyborg in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," she does it all to protect a young child.
But M3GAN is no chubby-faced toddler like Chucky and Annabelle,
nor is she really a doll in the same sense. She is built like a preteen,
maybe just slightly older than her 9-year-old ward Cady. She walks, she runs, she dances,
and she kills, all with the same inscrutable expression. In that way, the film also plays
with the "scary kid" trope, which at its best, gives us Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw"
and its adaptations like 1961's "The Innocents" and 2001's "The Others." At its worst, scary
kids are campy to the point of self-sabotage, as in the endless "Children of the Corn" sequels.
Most of the schlocky films that trade in the innate creepiness of a child's
blank stare don't have what "M3GAN" has, and that's a solid creative team guiding
the action. Director Gerard Johnstone cut his comedy-horror teeth on the 2014
New Zealand indie "Housebound," which he also wrote. Screenwriter Akela Cooper, meanwhile,
has emerged as one of the hottest names in horror on the strength of her script for 2021's
"Malignant," another surprise hit that pulls off a wild premise with style. She has also contributed
scripts to "American Horror Story," "Witches of East End," and the Netflix series "Chambers."
But arguably the biggest name behind the scenes of the film is horror maestro James Wan. As
the mastermind behind "Dead Silence" and the "Saw" and "Annabelle" series,
he's no stranger to creepy dolls. Wan, however, is quick to note that
this is actually his first killer doll movie, telling Deadline in January 2023,
"M3GAN" was filmed in New Zealand during the summer of 2021. Violet McGraw, who plays Cady,
was just ten years old at the time, but had already racked up an impressive genre
film and TV resume. She appeared as Florence Pugh's younger self in the Marvel superhero
blockbuster "Black Widow" and as the younger Victoria Pedretti in Mike Flanagan's Netflix
series "The Haunting of Hill House." Stand-up comic Ronny Chieng co-stars as
the shortsighted and ultimately doomed CEO of the toy company that manufactures M3GAN. Meanwhile,
"Girls" star Allison Williams picks up where she left off in "Get Out" and the
2018 Netflix thriller "The Perfection," building a reputation for herself as an upscale scream queen.
"I know she's not real, but she is talking and blinking, and her face is moving."
But the star of any monster movie is, of course, the monster. With her doll-like face and uncanny
movements that are graceful, robotic, and feral all at once, fans wondered if M3GAN was real or
a CGI creation. On screen, M3GAN is performed by a preteen dance prodigy from New Zealand
named Amie Donald, outfitted with a prosthetic mask whose expressions were enhanced by CGI.
M3GAN's creepily soothing voice was provided by former Disney Channel actor Jenna Davis.
"I actually got her voice pretty quickly and what I wanted her to be like."
The film is a co-production by Universal Pictures, Blumhouse Productions,
and Wan's Atomic Monster shingle. In the years since movie theater attendance cratered due
to pandemic restrictions, many studios have opted to release films directly to streaming
platforms. Other studios have attempted to preserve the moviegoing experience and the
revenue that goes with it, by releasing films in both formats at the same time.
"M3GAN," however, is a different story. According to Deadline, the film was always planned for the
big screen. Instead of a simultaneous theatrical and streaming premiere, Universal gave it a
good old-fashioned wide release on over 3,500 screens across the country, which is a major
vote of confidence in 2023. As it turned out, the film wildly overperformed on its first weekend,
grossing over $35 million in ticket sales when its estimated performance was nearly half that.
By far, the moment that captured the internet's attention was a short clip
from the film's climax in which M3GAN pauses in an office hallway to perform an acrobatic,
mesmerizing dance to the Skatt Brothers' 1979 disco rock hit "Walk the Night." Before long,
the dance had taken over TikTok and other social media sites, with amateur M3GANs
performing their own takes on the killer doll's moves. By January 9, 2023 the hashtag #M3GAN had
racked up nearly one billion views. At the film's December 7 premiere in Los Angeles,
a dance troupe of eight M3GANs even performed a red carpet routine to a Taylor Swift song.
The dance was not originally part of the script, however. It was developed on set
by director Gerard Johnstone, dancer Amie Donald, choreographer Jed Brophy,
and dance instructor Kylie Norris. In an interview with toofab.com, Johnstone said
"You know, I snuck it on the document to see if anyone would say anything."
Ultimately, he was relieved that the knowingly absurd scene was embraced
for both its spookiness and its silliness, noting,
"You're definitely walking a fine line when you do something like that,
and you just hope it's going to pay off."
The wildfire popularity of the M3GAN dance helped raise the film's public awareness, and other than
"Avatar," there was little competition in the first week of January for either eyeballs or
dollars. But it's also true that the film has received glowing reviews from critics,
and its Rotten Tomatoes score shot straight into "Certified Fresh" territory with near-unanimous
praise. Early positive notices may well have brought in skeptical audiences who feared
that the film was nothing more than a 20-second viral scene with 100 minutes of fluff around it.
The dance scene may not have been in Cooper's original script, but the tricky
tone that allows it to exist alongside grisly death scenes is very much present
on the page. This is a film that understands exactly what it is, as RogerEbert.com said,
While it's more overtly comic than Cooper and Wan's previous collaboration "Malignant,"
both films are fully committed to their premises, rooting even the goofiest moments in the emotions
and anxieties of the character. "M3GAN" is a movie about a killer doll, but it's also
about the way technological advances replace the human touch, literally or figuratively,
and the pressure that society places on women to be mothers, whether they want to be or not.
"M3GAN" is a center-parted psychopath dressed like a Victorian schoolgirl
crossed with a 1970s businesswoman. A four-foot menace whose eyes may be fake,
but they can still judge everything she sees. A My Size Barbie come to
life with an ice-cold demeanor and a sassy mouth. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
before the movie was even released, M3GAN was declared a new queer horror icon,
per Out. While Cooper attributed the character's popularity in the gay community to the film's
themes of found family, others have a more simple and blunt explanation. As one Twitter user put it,
Before the film was released, author and academic Joe Vallese spoke to Vox about
the character's imagery and her place in a continuum of "subverted femininity"
that includes recent horror villains like The Babadook, the deformed mother
living underground in 2022's "Barbarian," and Octavia Spencer's "Ma." As Vallese sees it,
the limitations of sexual expression in a heteronormative society lead
many queer people to identify with the characters who are considered monsters.
"They seemed to understand what her energy was, which was like the best."
After its first successful weekend at the box office,
Universal had already begun talks of a sequel. Director Gerard Johnstone, for one,
seems excited for the prospect of another visit to the M3GAN-verse, telling Variety,
But we may not have to wait for a brand new film to get more M3GAN
in our lives. According to screenwriter Akela Cooper, Universal cut a lot of the
violence and gore out of the film in order to secure a PG-13 rating, so an expanded,
R-rated edition may be in the works. Cooper told the Los Angeles Times,
Hopefully we'll be able to see M3GAN unleash her full bloody power in the future.