Horror movies don’t always set the box office alight, and new Universal and Blumhouse collaboration M3GAN seemed certain to suffer with Avatar: The Way of Water still taking up a sizable chuck of cinema space right now. However, the film’s opening this weekend looks set to be an unexpected hit, with a predicted $17-$20 million box office that would see the movie make back its production cost and more besides.
With so many mega-budget movies being released recently and taking weeks to break even with slow or stunted box office results, it is almost hard to register that a film could turn a profit at the box office in just a single weekend. However, M3GAN comes with a lowly $12 million budget and according to Variety, the film’s opening weekend could easily pull back that cost and much more.
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As a PG-13 release, the movie has been given a box office boost by reshooting some scenes to tone down its blood and gore to secure a more friendly rating that could well prove a smart move to secure the film’s success at the notoriously tough January box office. What has not hurt the movie’s potential earning is how the character has been attached to a number of social media memes and TikTok videos, which can be all it takes to turn a movie into a cultural phenomenon.
Is M3GAN a Natural Successor To Child’s Play’s Chucky?
The comparisons between M3GAN and Child’s Play are inevitable. M3GAN centres on a robotic engineer, Gemma, who creates the titular robot for her niece, Cady. While protective and friendly to Cady, M3GAN quickly gains a mind of its own, disobeys commands, and transforms into a lethal android killing machine.
While there are obvious differences between the two movies and their respective killer dolls, M3GAN has a feel of a killer doll movie for a technologically advanced generation. While 2019’s Child’s Play reboot attempted to go down this route, its success was hampered by the iconic franchise it was trying to reimagine. M3GAN doesn’t come with that baggage, and that potentially lead the movie into being the start of a brand new Blumhouse franchise.
M3GAN’s director and producer James Wan, known for his work on the Saw movies as well as The Conjuring Universe, certainly isn’t wanting to just sit back and admire his latest creation. Wan recently told Collider that he already has an idea of where a sequel could go. He said:
M3GAN is scheduled to be theatrically released in the United States on January 6, 2023
“What I will say to that is, in any of my movies, whether it’s The Conjuring Universe, or Saw, or Malignant, or M3GAN here, we like to think of a bigger world. For me, it’s about creating the world, and knowing who the characters are, where the story could potentially go, and then building this bigger world, and then going into that and going, “Okay, I’m telling this particular story, but I know other stuff that’s going on.” So if we’re fortunate enough to have sequels, then we have an idea of where we want to go.”
