M3GAN 2.0 Faces One Big Challenge At The Box Office That The Original Didn't

It is very hard to turn an original movie into a hit these days, with horror often being the one genre where new ideas can flourish. Even so, it rarely works out quite as well as it did for "M3GAN." The Blumhouse horror/comedy arrived in early 2023 and kicked off that year's box office with a bang, becoming an unexpectedly huge hit for Universal Pictures. Naturally, that means a sequel. Enter "M3GAN 2.0," which is due to hit theaters next weekend. The question is, can it repeat the success of its predecessor under more difficult conditions?

Director Gerard Johnstone's "M3GAN 2.0" is currently eyeing a domestic opening weekend in the $23 to $32 million range. For context, the first "M3GAN" opened just north of $30 million in January 2023, en route to a $180 million global finish. That made it, for a time, one of the biggest original movies of the pandemic era. It was especially great for a movie with a mere $12 million budget. So an opening in a similar range sets it up for success, at least on the surface.

Part of the problem is that Brad Pitt's cool-looking racing drama "F1" also hits theaters that weekend, with a $56 to $72 million opening in the cards. A couple of weeks ago, Deadline had both movies opening in the $30 million range, but "F1" has seen its stock go up as the release date has crept closer. The other thing is that Universal and Blumhouse absolutely spent more than $12 million on the sequel. How much more, exactly? That's yet to be revealed, but even if it's triple the amount, $36 million is relatively cheap by summer movie standards.

Even so, it's hard to deny that competition is going to be a major factor here. "28 Years Later" arrives this upcoming weekend and figures to hold up pretty well. "Jurassic World Rebirth" is just around the corner in early July. It's a crowded summer season, and that's a key difference for Blumhouse and Universal this time around.

The sequel picks up two years later after M3GAN went rogue and embarked on a murderous rampage. She was subsequently destroyed, and M3GAN's creator, Gemma (Allison Williams) is now a high-profile author who advocates for government oversight of AI, while her niece Cady (Violet McGraw), now a teenager, rebels against Gemma's overprotective rules. Meanwhile, the underlying tech used to create M3GAN has been stolen by a defense contractor to create a military-grade weapon known as Amelia.

"M3GAN" had the benefit of a January release, where there is, generally speaking, far less competition. To that end, it didn't face any meaningful competition from a new release until "Knock at the Cabin" in February, with "Avatar: The Way of Water" topping the charts for seven straight weekends before that. The sequel will get no such benefit, with "Superman," "I Know What You Did Last Summer," and "Fantastic Four: First Steps" all arriving in July, among others.

The trailers for "M3GAN 2.0" have gone full "Terminator 2," promising a bigger sequel with a new villain. It's not just delivering the same thing all over again. That can be risky, but it also might help avoid the "I've seen it already" attitude that can lead to sequels dropping off. Originality helped the first movie become a real cultural moment. Not playing it safe can potentially help the sequel do the same.

A lot of this may not be up to Universal, which showed real confidence by giving this movie a summer release. Will the internet take to the sequel the same way it did with the first installment? Can we get another viral moment like M3GAN dancing? Will TikTok take the ball and run with it? We'll see

"M3GAN 2.0" hits theaters on June 27, 2025.