Did Jason Blum really just blame the Man of Steel for M3GAN 2.0’s financial struggles at the box office? The answer is a resounding yes. To be clear, though, the CEO of Blumhouse Productions isn’t calling out James Gunn’s upcoming Superman film. Rather, Blum is referring to the character itself, and how the Blumhouse creative team thought M3GAN (Jenna Davis, Amie Donald) was somehow akin to the Last Son of Krypton. Blum explained while appearing on The Town with Matthew Belloni podcast by saying:
“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 the bad guy into the good guy. And we kind of classically overthought how powerful people’s engagement was with her.”
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M3GAN 2.0’s actual problem stems from the fact that Blum and company decided to pull a genre swap much like what happened with another murderbot franchise’s first and second films: The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. However, unlike those classic Arnold Schwarzenegger movies which successfully transitioned from the horror space to the action genre, M3GAN 2.0’s similar evolution from 2022’s M3GAN left the fans sorely disappointed. Blum addressed the more realistic reason for the sequel’s failure, as opposed to placing the blame on Superman, by saying in the same interview:
“We decided to genre swap, [and] the audience wasn’t ready to genre swap. Every time you do a sequel, you have to ride this very fine line, which is if you make it too close to the first movie, everyone says, ‘You ripped off the first movie and why’d you make this movie, what a waste of time.’ And if you make it too far away from the first movie, everyone says, ‘Why the fu*k is this a sequel, this has nothing to do with the first movie, and we’re pissed about it.'”
Is ‘M3GAN 2.0’ Destined to Be a Box Office Flop?
Jason Blum can grease the wheels of blame all he wants, but it wasn’t Superman who had anything to do with M3GAN 2.0’s poor box office returns over the film’s opening weekend. No, the blame squarely lies with Blumhouse Productions and Universal Pictures’ creatives for somehow thinking that shifting gears from the horror genre to an action-oriented sequel would appease the fans. In fact, it had the opposite reaction altogether, as the M3GAN fandom was jolted by the follow-up’s change in tone despite positive grades.
Now, in fairness to M3GAN 2.0, the film holds a solid “B+” CinemaScore and continues to register an 83% Popcornmeter rating, formerly the Rotten Tomatoes audience score. Both those grades are higher than its predecessor’s “B” CinemaScore and 78% Popcornmeter rating. Nonetheless, the follow-up to 2022’s M3GAN barely cracked the Top 5 over its opening weekend as the film only eked out a disappointing fourth-place finish with only a mere $10.2 million domestically against a production budget of $25 million.
By comparison, M3GAN made $30.4 million over its opening weekend en route to a worldwide total of $181.8 million during its theatrical run, and, at the time of this writing, M3GAN 2.0 has only brought home $18.1 million globally. So, whereas M3GAN was a cash cow for Blumhouse Productions, the sequel needs to make approximately $62.5 million just to avoid losing money at the box office, according to the old standby Hollywood formula that a film needs to make 2.5 times its production budget to break even. Thus, in conclusion, despite the positive grades received by the fans, M3GAN 2.0 is faced with failing financially because audiences simply didn’t show up in theaters to see the mediocre sequel. So, yes, M3GAN 2.0 is well on its way to owning the box office flop moniker.
Sources: The Town with Matthew Belloni, The Numbers
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