As M3GAN 2.0 struggles to live up to its original prototype, Blumhouse is taking stock of their latest box office loss.
Joking he’s “been in pain all weekend long” after the sequel opened to $10.2 million ($17M worldwide), Jason Blum recently
“I thought, you know what? If Blumhouse is in a slump, I’d like to tell that story. I don’t want other people to tell that story, number one,” the Blumhouse founder and CEO prefaced on The Town podcast.
“And number two, one of the things that is so annoying about our business, is everyone says, ‘Oh, I learned so much from failure.’ But when they’re actually in a situation where things are not going well, they sweep it under the rug,” Blum told host Matthew Belloni. “They pretend it’s not happening.”
Noting that the sequel to the 2022 horror/thriller was on track for a $45 million opening 10 weeks ago, Blum admitted his team actually thought it had a chance of outgrossing F1‘s debut, which hit $57 million ($146.3M). “This tells you how bananas tracking is in this current marketplace,” he said.
“Clearly, there is a huge audience who is excited to go to the movie,” added Blum. “The key is, we can’t figure out what movies they want to go see.”
As the projected opening declined to $30 million, Blum was fine with that number, as the original opened to $30.4M. But the week of release, it dropped to $20M. “Then I was upset,” he said, adding that he went on “a death spiral of depression” before waking up to the final amount.
“So, it’s pretty amazing—and I think that’s a new thing about the marketplace. It’s just very different and it’s incredibly hard to get your arms around,” added Blum.
“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 a bad guy into a good guy,” he explained. “And we kind of classically overthought how powerful people’s engagement was, really, with her.”
Blum partially chalked up the failure to the genre-swap from horror/thriller to action/comedy, as well as its summer release, also noting director Gerard Johnstone “is someone who could solve almost anything you throw at him, but needs time. He’s just one of those directors that needs a lot of time.”
“And 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,” he continued. “And on this, again, we’ve gone over our skis too far, summer movie, change the genre, set the date. We got too excited by M3gan, and she didn’t work.”
As Deadline’s Anthony D’Allesandro wrote in his box office analysis, sequels to gimmick horror movies are hard. There’s a fine line between replicating the original and veering too far from the original. M3GAN 2.0 veered.
M3GAN 2.0 comes at a time when Blumhouse is on a bad streak with The Woman in The Yard ($22.4M domestic), Wolf Man ($20.7M) and Drop ($16.6M). Thank God they make ’em cheap, this one at $25M before P&A.
The post Jason Blum Unpacks ‘M3GAN 2.0’ Flop After Treating Her “Like Superman”: “We Got Too Excited” appeared first on Deadline.
