The slasher film is in a weird state of limbo at the moment. After a boom period in the 70s and 80s, the genre all but vanished over the past twenty years. Only a few big names stayed around through the quiet years, but a new challenger emerged to reach for the throne. Her name is M3gan, and she may be here to stay.
M3GAN is a campy horror film that dropped at a notoriously terrible time of year for film releases. Despite expectations, the film immediately attracted a host of fans. Blumhouse loves a franchise but does the original film leave room for possible sequels? Obviously, spoilers ahead for M3GAN.
What happens in M3GAN?
M3GAN opens with the sudden and tragic death of nine-year-old Cady's parents. Devastated and orphaned, Cady is sent across the country to live with her aunt in Seattle. Her aunt Gemma is a gifted roboticist who works at one of the biggest toy companies in the world. Though her boss is always pushing her to create something cheap and marketable, she's driven by the urge to innovate scientifically. When Cady is dropped into her lap, she finds herself both incompetent and unwilling to raise a child. Gemma decides to complete a project she'd previously abandoned, a ridiculously advanced AI system called the Model 3 Generative Android, or M3gan for short. She finishes M3gan and pairs Cady with the AI, advancing her research and giving her niece a reliable friend. Before long, however, M3gan begins acting strange.
M3gan's programming leads her to protect Cady at all costs. If someone hurts her charge, the punishment is death. As bodies start piling up, Gemma discovers that M3gan is killing with impunity and covering her tracks. At the same time, Cady is becoming overly reliant on her android friend, and the emotional outbursts when they're apart become worrying. She finally resolves to shut M3gan down, but her creation won't go quietly. After a killing spree at Gemma's office, M3gan follows her creator home for the final showdown.
M3gan wants to force Gemma and Cady back into a happy family, she wants to continue serving her function as Cady's guard, and she'll kill anybody to make that happen. In the struggle, she offers Cady the chance to mortally wound her aunt and live with M3gan for the rest of her days. In the grand tradition of killer doll movies, she refuses. M3gan is torn in half and her central processing chip is destroyed. However, in the movie's final moments, Gemma's smart home device flickers to life furtively. M3gan's body may be destroyed, but it seems as if she's still alive.
What does the ending of M3GAN mean for the franchise?
M3GAN borrows a lot from other horror films. Most notably, it takes a lot of its structure from the 1988 classic Child's Play and its subsequent Chucky franchise. The ending of M3GAN is very reminiscent of the ending of the original film. This suggests that, if there is a next entry in the franchise, it'll follow a similar path to Child's Play 2. The final scene of the movie tacitly reveals the fact that M3gan's programming is still active. She's now a soul without a body, alive in the smart home system of her creator. M3gan's powers were ill-defined at the best of times, but the film made it clear that she could interface with nearby connected devices. Given that her goal is still to protect Cady, she can likely fulfill that role from the safety of the smart home system. However, given Child's Play 2 as an example and how iconic M3gan has already become, it's likely she'll get a fresh new body.
M3GAN is doing pretty well at the box office for a mid-budget horror movie released in January. The online buzz has turned the tile character into a specific audience's favorite type of slasher villain. She joined Mr. Babadook before the film hit the screen. There's a very good chance of Blumhouse setting M3gan loose again as soon as next year. Their yearly franchises aren't always the best things they produce, but they're the bread and butter of the studio. M3gan is still alive, and she could easily be the subject of a full-on slasher franchise. There are a near-infinite number of ways to keep M3gan around through future sequels.
As long as there have been slasher movies, there have been endings that seem to kill the villain, only to reveal that they're still around. Many of those big reveals go without payoff as the idea fails to spawn a franchise. Whatever one could say about M3GAN, it has the makings of a trashy campy Blumhouse horror franchise. A lot of the other big names took three or four sequels to fully go off the rails. With M3GAN as a starting point, it'll be very interesting to see the franchise's future developments.