“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?’”
Anna Kaplan, TODAY
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