M3gan is back, but she’s not alone. The murder doll might finally meet her match in Amelia, the ultimate killer spy developed using M3Gan’s A.I. technology. As doll fights doll, Universal collaborated with drag stars M1ss Jade So and Janio to transform themselves into the upgraded M3gan and her new foe Amelia for M3GAN 2.0.
For director Gerard Johnstone, M3gan’s time to wake up from sleep mode has come, and for M3GAN 2.0, he wants her to evolve to a whole new being. . “I never want to repeat myself, and telling the same story again with slight variations didn’t feel right for M3gan—especially after the unexpected cultural moment the first film became,” Johnstone says. “When we made the original, it reflected a time when I was deeply concerned about how technology, especially things like iPads and smartphones, was reshaping parenting. But by the time we started thinking about the sequel, Chat GPT had arrived, and the conversation around A.I. had shifted. Suddenly, it was not about whether A.I. would become part of our lives—it already was. That is what inspired the new film: the idea that M3gan is not going anywhere, so what does it mean to live with her? Is she entirely bad, or did her behavior come from how she was raised—how Gemma trained her? And if she had been guided differently, could she have learned the difference between right and wrong? Those are the questions we are exploring now.”
Johnstone elaborates more on Amelia, M3gan’s new adversary. “In a lot of ways, Amelia is M3gan 2.0—she’s M3gan rebuilt with military hardware, and her sole purpose is revenge,” Johnstone says. “For all of M3gan’s flaws, at least she was designed to protect Gemma’s niece, Cady. But Amelia seems to have been reprogrammed, and once she becomes self-aware and goes rogue, all she has is animosity toward the people who created her, tortured her and treated her like a slave. It raises this fascinating question: if we build robots to serve us, and they become self-aware, how are they going to feel about us?”
Producer James Wan feels like in this A.I world that they are exploring, self-awareness would spell danger for humanity. . “If M3gan represents, at least in this film, the idea of a potentially positive A.I., then Amelia is the dark side of that—something built to do harm, with the potential to be deeply disruptive to humanity,” Wan says. “Sure, the government or whoever created her might believe they can control her. But what happens if she becomes sentient? What happens when she decides, ‘I don’t want to be confined by the code of humanity—I want to be something greater’? That is the real fear with A.I. It keeps learning, and at some point, it may realize the fastest way to evolve is to eliminate the main threat. And that threat is humans.”
Watch M3gan go next level as M3GAN 2.0 opens in Philippine cinemas on June 25.
