M3GAN 2.0: The Future of AI in Techno-Horror Comedies

The M3GAN franchise has captured the attention of film fans since its debut in January 2023, with the first film, M3GAN, becoming a techno-horror comedy that delved into the emotional dependence of today's youth on their devices. Directed by New Zealander Gerard Johnstone, the film grossed nearly $182 million against a budget of $12 million and starred Violet McGraw as Cady James, a young girl who loses her parents in a car accident and is raised by her aunt, Gemma Forrester (Allison Williams), with the help of a prototype android doll named M3GAN. However, Cady becomes too reliant on M3GAN, leading to the AI-powered toy killing four people (and a dog) in the name of protecting her. Johnstone's sequel, M3GAN 2.0, explores the same questions that were being asked in real life at the time of its release: has AI technology like ChatGPT been fully baked? Can we really trust an artificially intelligent entity? Is the human workforce about to become obsolete? Johnstone believes that we do bear some responsibility in how we use AI and that if it does bad things, it's not necessarily because the AI itself is bad but because of the way we've trained it. In M3GAN 2.0, a defense contractor acquires M3GAN's leaked source code to create AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), a military-grade killer android who immediately defies the U.S. government and goes rogue. AMELIA targets anyone who had anything to do with her creation, forcing Gemma to rebuild a hopefully more reliable M3GAN as humanity's first line of defense. The plot may seem similar to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but Johnstone insists any such overlap was purely coincidental and that he was focused on a redemption arc for M3GAN. Johnstone is level-headed about AI in and of itself but admits that the current volatility in just about every walk of life has made him particularly nostalgic about the past. "I am trying not to be a curmudgeon, but I kind of hate this future in so many ways," he shares. "And it’s really strange to be a parent in the modern age." The M3GAN franchise could have a long shelf life as each subsequent film explores the latest developments in AI technology. Johnstone is not surprised if there are another five movies in the series and even jokes about possibly returning for the fifth one. During a recent conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Johnstone also reflected on the debate around whether to market M3GAN's iconic dance in the first movie's trailer and M3GAN 2.0's follow-up dance sequence. He explains that Universal did something clever by marketing the film as a straight horror movie while including the dance as a subversion of tone. This allowed people to take footage from the film and recut it to make M3GAN a cultural icon.