“M3GANs, can you look into the distance please?” a choreographer asks, watching a photo shoot unfold. “Thank you!”
Two actors dressed as the enigmatic villain from “M3GAN,” the 2023 film about a robotic doll with an inclination for murder, move their heads to face straight out, their contact lense-covered aqua blue eyes twinkling as they move uncannily in sync.
Bewildered yet intrigued tourists look on from behind a roped-off area on the 70th floor of Rockefeller Center, as the women — err, dolls — readjust to face the camera for their photo shoot on Top of the Rock.
Standing in between is Jenna Davis, the voice behind the creepy, life-like doll that has become the face of the “M3GAN” franchise, which has returned for a sequel film, “M3GAN 2.0.”
The franchise only plans to go bigger, better and — most importantly — more unexpected from here, the stars tell TODAY.com.
“It was so unpredictable, what happened with the first one. Now I’m sitting here saying I want to do ‘M3GAN’ 7. Let’s do 8. Where can her story go?” Davis says. “Maybe we can make it a rom-com next. Switch up the genre.”
Unpredictable is the word to describe “M3GAN’s” pop culture journey. Marketed as a horror film, “M3GAN” became more of a camp cult classic after its release in January 2023.
In the film, M3GAN is a robotic doll powered by artificial intelligence. Her creator, Gemma (Allison Williams), tasked M3GAN with keeping her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) safe … and she takes her orders a bit too seriously.
The franchise leaned in to M3GAN’s absurdity for the sequel, marking the beginning of the cheekily abbreviated MCU — and no, not that one — the M3GAN Cinematic Universe.
“I feel extremely thrilled to have been part of building a world that feels iterative, that feels like a playground on which we can have these characters that are a little bit larger than life, and also can create fertile ground for conversations that are deeply urgent,” says Williams, who stars and serves as a producer on both films.
And on Top of the Rock on the hottest day of the year so far, amid headlines of an AI uprising, the M3GANs keep their cool. Perhaps this is their element.
M3GAN as a first impression
Davis didn’t know what to expect when she read the script for “M3GAN.”
“I thought it was for a video game,” she says. “And I had no idea it would become what it is today. Nobody could have predicted that at all.”
When a casting director approached her about the movie, the Texas-born actor had credits on Disney Channel and voiced characters on Netflix. This would be her biggest project yet.
“When I read for the character, I chose her voice that is in the film right away, because I knew that she was a robot,” Davis says. “She was a bit sassy, a bit evil, but very funny and campy. And so I wanted to play into that and make her more human-like, so it’s uncanny.”
Davis filmed her audition on the floor of her bedroom closet. Her sweet, slightly sinister tone would go on to define the doll and shoot her to stardom in her own right — she’s amassed millions of followers and also released her debut country album, “Where Did That Girl Go?”, on June 27 — the same day “M3GAN 2.0” premiered in theaters.
“I’m from Texas, so the saying is, ‘Go big or go home.’ So I thought, why not put both out on the same day and just see what happens? I think it’s just the beginning for the ‘M3GAN’ franchise, but also for my music as well,” she says.
Even though she’s not as recognizable as her counterpart, she embraces her — and her mischievous spirit. Davis, 21, says she has a life-sized M3GAN doll she keeps in her living room and takes with her around Los Angeles.
“My favorite thing to do is prank people with it. I put her in my car for the carpool lane in LA, or I also put her in the drive-thru in my passenger seat,” she says.
Allison Williams, meanwhile, totally got “M3GAN” when she first read the script — and it terrified her.
She was approached by Jason Blum, one of the co-founders of Blumhouse Productions, the production company behind horror classics like “Paranormal Activity,” “Insidious” and “The Purge.” Williams and Blum had worked together on “Get Out,” and Williams says she loved her experience on the film.
“He reached out to me when they were developing the ‘M3GAN’ script,” Williams says. “He was like, ‘I think we need you for this one.’”
Williams read “M3GAN” on her phone going from New York to Connecticut. (Which wasn’t easy, she says — “it’s a lot of pinching and scrolling.”)
“But I just was so taken with it, and what I loved about it the most was just that it spoke so directly to the rumbling anxiety of my friends about their kids interacting with tech,” she says.
Williams is now a mom herself and felt, even back then, that AI would be her “next frontier of worry.”
She knew “M3GAN” had the potential to spark a cultural moment about the dangers of AI, but she wasn’t sure if audiences would fully get what the film was trying to do.
“The biggest asterisk was the tone of the movie. The fact that there was an animatronic doll at the core of it, made it pretty specific and risky,” she says. “There was a chance that people weren’t going to be into it, because it was going so hard at being what it was — we weren’t holding back or hedging anything. It was just like, we’re going for this, and that always has a certain amount of risk with it.”
Davis felt the fear, too. “It was very scary at first, because introducing a new villain is no joke,” she says. “She was so unique and different, and that was terrifying for me as well, because I didn’t know how audiences were going to react.”
M3GAN as a queer icon
Enter M3GAN, with her unsettlingly girl-like appearance, snarky wit and … murderous rampages. Gemma tells M3GAN her objective is to keep Cady safe, which M3GAN takes to new levels when she begins killing those who try to get close to Cady — which totals four people and a dog.
But it’s not the gore or the shock factor that captured audiences — it was M3GAN’s dancing, singing, and at times, galloping, that shook theatergoers into becoming obsessed with the robot. The movie became a near-instant classic, generating some $180 million worldwide on just a $12 million budget.
Once the movie was out, audiences took “M3GAN” to places the creators may not have expected at first — like West Hollywood’s pride parade. M3GAN’s murderous tendencies have been forgiven by those who prefer to focus on her cheeky humor.
“In this case, we were rewarded for just committing to the whole bit, and people really got it,” Williams says.
Davis says she first became aware of M3GAN’s status as a queer icon on her phone, when she was tagged in fan edits.
“Now she’s at Pride Month, and it is so awesome because they’re the most supportive community ever,” Davis says.
When asked if the team behind the film was expecting M3GAN to become a queer icon, Williams, through laughter, quickly replies: “No.”
“I think if we had been making her with the expectation that she would be a queer icon, she would have been dismissed by the queer community,” Williams says.
“It was like, if you just commit to the truth of it, making her feel like an authentic, real person, making all the characters real, making the world feel real, making the tone feel consistent, then you stand a better chance of creating a character that can be embraced by a community that loves a bold woman living in the truest expression of herself,” she adds.
M3GAN as a sequel
“M3GAN 2.0” defies expectations once again by totally reinventing the character that made the franchise a hit. The sequel goes almost full action movie while highlighting the need for AI regulation.
Two years after Gemma and her niece Cady neutralize M3GAN, they’ve resettled in San Francisco. Then, they learn a new robot is on the scene. A military contractor got hold of the leaked code that powered M3GAN and built a new robot: AMELIA, short for Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android.
The feds put Gemma and her crew in charge of AMELIA when she, just like M3GAN, begins to go rogue. The only way to end AMELIA? Bring back M3GAN.
Ivanna Sakhno, who portrays AMELIA, tells TODAY.com about joining the franchise as a new enemy.
“There’s definitely a sense of responsibility, because you know how beloved it is by people, so you want to just do it justice,” Sakhno says. “I do have full trust in (director) Gerard (Johnstone) and his vision, and I have to applaud him for being so open to go so far with it and being unpretentious in its craziness. He wasn’t afraid to do something quite different from the first one and take a risk.”
Davis also hopes audiences love the fighting scenes between M3GAN and AMELIA, as they start to see M3GAN as something other than just a villain.
“I think the funny thing about M3GAN is, yes, she’s a villain, but she can also be seen as a hero. But she’s also hilarious, and she’s sassy, and she doesn’t care what you’re saying, she just says it. I think it’s really fun for audiences, because they don’t know what’s going to happen next for her, and they can’t predict it.”
“I also think there’s some kinship between AMELIA and M3GAN — although there’s rivalry and fear that is also felt, they see each other. They’re made of the same seed. But M3GAN is that b----,” Sakhno says with a smile, before adding, “Respectfully.”
M3GAN as a trilogy — and beyond
While a third installment of “M3GAN” hasn’t yet been greenlit, Williams, while appearing on TODAY on June 24, highlighted the fact there is a number “3” in the title of the films.
“We put a three in the first title, which was a conundrum, and it sort of means we have to be allowed to,” Williams said. “It’s already been there, it’s predestined.”
“That said,” she added, “we are dreaming of a third. We have talked about it and wondered what it would look like, and we’ve had some of those conversations, but we’ll need to see what happens this weekend.”
“M3GAN 2.0” is projecting $10 million in its opening weekend, according to Box Office Mojo, but regardless of whether the franchise becomes a trilogy, the M3GAN Cinematic Universe has already begun, Williams tells TODAY.com.
“You can take a real, deep, important theme that’s hard to talk about and put it into this mixy genre, and then suddenly people are able to talk about it in a bigger way,” Williams says. “And then doing it with ‘M3GAN,’ I realized, you can keep doing this.”
Williams is an executive producer on “SOULM8TE,” a “M3GAN” spinoff set in the same universe, premiering in 2026. The details on the film are minimal, though viewers do know that it follows a man who buys an android to help cope with the loss of his wife.
“From the moment the M3GAN doll was an idea, we were kind of like, because people are people, we just know it’s a matter of time before someone is like, ‘What about this, but for sex?’” Williams says with a smile.
“It’s not just that, obviously, it’s more complicated, and I don’t want to spoil anything or give too many details, but it’s sort of like an R-rated adventure into this world where we get to see M3GAN technology extrapolated into a use case that we do not explore in our franchise,” she continues.
Davis also calls the opportunities within the MCU “endless.”
“Especially because of how prevalent AI is in our society, and because of how uncanny it is,” she says. “Even with the first film, they predicted AI portraits, and then they came out — what are they predicting in this film that’s going to come true?”
Williams hopes that this franchise, which started as a question mark and then became a phenomenon, can spark relevant conversations about the world we’re living in, or about to be.
She points to the themes of the sequel — AI regulation (“not the sexiest”) and parenthood — as an example.
“We feel very strongly about the fact that people need to think about these things and to talk about them more openly. And we’re just hopeful that, as a result of this movie and all the other movies in the cinematic universe, people will have those conversations on the way to the car,” Williams says.
“You can talk about the things that are funny, yeah, whatever. But like later at dinner, when the giggling dies down, it’s like, ‘But really, what are we doing? What is our plan here? What are we going to do about these really intelligent lines of code that we’ve written?’”
