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Following years of hype, an inescapable ad campaign, and a popcorn vessel with a detachable face, M3GAN 2.0 flopped at the box office over the weekend. While many in the industry have been playing Monday morning quarterback over why, Jason Blum called into Matt Belloni’s podcast, The Town, to explain what went wrong with the movie everyone thought they wanted. It’s the latest in a string of disappointments for the reliable mid-budget hitmaker, with Wolf Man, The Woman In The Yard, and Drop all disappointing before M3GAN 2.0 swooped in on a wingsuit. “If Blumhouse is in a slump, I’d like to tell that story,” Blum said. “I don’t want other people to tell that story.”
Blum isn’t sugarcoating it for himself. People did go to the multiplex last weekend, just not to see his movie. They’d rather see Brad Pitt show the youngsters how it’s done than watch M3GAN confuse her brand. “Clearly, there is a huge audience who is excited to go to the movies,” he continued. “We can’t figure out what movies they wanna go see.” Ultimately, it sounds like they tried to make all the movies they might want to see, treating M3GAN as everything other than the mean girl bot who kills people who disrespect her bestie. Blumhouse thought she “was like Superman,” and like Superman, “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.” She had all those classic Superman traits, but Belloni concludes that audiences wanted “something the same but different.” However, after two years of memes and an antagonistic ad campaign, it felt like Blumhouse was leaning too hard into the joke with M3GAN 2.0. Deliberately camp is a difficult tone to pull off, and whereas M3GAN felt like it came out of nowhere, with M3GAN 2.0, the character became a forced meme, and nobody wants that. Still, a sequel to a massive hit bombing at the box office? It really is, as Blum puts it, “a classic Hollywood story.”
[via Vulture]
