M3GAN 2.0 Flop Was Due to Genre Swap, Jason Blum Admits Mistakes

Jason Blum is opening up about why M3GAN 2.0 flopped at the box office.

M3GAN 2.0 was released in United States theaters this past weekend from Blumhouse and Universal Pictures. The movie underperformed at the box office, as it has so far only grossed approximately $18 million worldwide. The first M3GAN movie, in comparison, made $181.8 million.

What did Jason Blum say about M3GAN 2.0?

Speaking on The Town with Matt Belloni podcast, Blumhouse’s Jason Blum opened up about what went wrong with M3GAN 2.0.

Blum said, “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.”

The first M3GAN movie was largely marketed as a horror movie, while M3GAN 2.0 swaps genres and instead plays more as an action thriller.

Speaking further about M3GAN 2.0’s genre-swap, Blum commented, “Every time you do a sequel, you have to ride this very fine line — if you make it too close to the first movie, everyone says you ripped off the first movie. ‘Why’d you make this movie? What a waste of time.’ If you make it too far away from the first movie, everyone says, ‘Why the f— is this a sequel? This has nothing to do with the first movie and we’re pissed about it.’”

Noting that releasing the movie in the summer may not have been the best idea, Blum further said, “On the first M3GAN, [director Gerard Johnstone] is someone who can solve almost anything you throw at him, but he needs time. He’s just one of those directors who needs a lot of time. On the first M3GAN, he had all the time in the world. I don’t think we even had a release date until the movie got finished….We got too excited. We got too excited by M3GAN and, you know, she didn’t work. So that’s what happened.”

Source: Comingsoon.net