M3GAN boldly asks: remember fun?
As M3GAN blows past box office expectations, it also delivers a cheeky reminder to Hollywood about why people actually go to the movies
Aux Features Films
This weekend, the top film at the domestic box office was, predictably, Avatar: The Way Of Water, earning $45 million in its fourth weekend. In second place was M3GAN, the latest very funny entry into the scary doll horror genre, earning $30 million against a $12 million budget. A sequel is already in the works, per Deadline.
Deadline also cites M3GAN’s viral marketing campaign as a key ingredient for its success, which is undeniably true; the moment the first trailer dropped, TikTokers and Tweeters were remixing the brief clip of M3GAN dancing from the trailer over their favorite songs. From there, the film used an army of live M3GANs to promote the film from the top of the Empire State Building, the sideline of a Los Angeles Chargers game, and from the audience of Allison Williams’ Jimmy Fallon appearance. There was a M3GAN Twitter account that you can chat with and will send you vaguely threatening DMs.
Stunts like this so often feel cringey and desperate, but there was something charming about the shamelessness of the M3GANs—like the titular doll in the movie, they were desperate not just for your attention, but your affection. They were coming to you, in their robotic, vaguely threatening way, asking to be liked. And, unlike too many movie marketing campaigns, M3GAN was specific in what it was promising: fun.
It’s not that M3GAN was the only fun movie of the past year, but it may be the only one that positioned fun as the primary reason to go out and buy a ticket. 2022 was always going to be a tough year for the box office as theaters struggled to return to a post-lockdown normal and the word “recession” was constantly bandied about. It was going to be an uphill battle to get audiences out of their homes and into theaters, and studios often stressed the importance of their product rather than the entertainment factor.
Take for example last fall’s Bros. When Billy Eichner was promoting his romantic comedy, he used his media appearances to lean into the dubious claim that the film was the first of its kind as a big-budget, mainstream, gay, romantic comedy. The subtext in all of this was that this movie was capital-I Important, and, as such, you have a responsibility to support it. However, that line may have had the unintended consequence of alienating potential audiences; when Bros underperformed, Eichner took to social media to bemoan straight people staying home as a potential culprit. Anecdotally, more than a couple A.V. Club commenters pointed out that the film’s trailer seemed to tell straight audiences that this wasn’t a movie for them—the “Remember straight people?” line at the end of the trailer was specifically highlighted. (For what it’s worth, the trailer almost exclusively highlighted the worst jokes in an otherwise smartly written romantic comedy.)
Babylon, even more of a box office misfire than Bros, also had a bad trailer that told audiences almost nothing about the film. After seeing the trailer about eight times over the past four months, you still could have assumed it was about how Brad Pitt convinced Los Angeles to allow dogs and actors into restaurants, not how the end of the silent film era brought about a new era of conservatism in Hollywood. And again, there was the frustrating proposition (admittedly, not from the studio itself but from those who work in film media) that there was a moral imperative to go spend money on this movie if you care about Real Cinema. It’s not that this film is particularly good or entertaining, the supporters say, but that if you don’t see this big important film, there will only be fewer big important films.
Even The Way Of Water, far and away the biggest financial success of these films, still leaned into its own importance with its marketing. This wasn’t some dumb Marvel movie—this was something real. This was an artistic undertaking. Kate Winslet thought she died because she held her breath for so long filming the underwater sequences. Those underwater sequences used “revolutionary” technology, according to The Walt Disney Company. Production was so pricey that The Way Of Water famously had to become the third or fourth highest-grossing film of all time to break even. Again, the same subtext emerges: this is an important work, and if you care about film and want further important works to be made, you have to support it.
The thing is, the Avatar franchise is fundamentally kind of goofy. Yes, it deals with themes of colonialism, and the first one was nominated for Best Picture. But it’s also a 3D franchise about 10-foot-tall blue cat-people who have sex with each other via braid and talk to space whales. Seeing a movie like that should be fun. Seeing a romantic comedy should also probably be fun. Seeing a horror-comedy flick about a dancing killer doll should be fun. All of these movies were fun to varying degrees, but somehow, it was only the latter of these that really leaned into this element for trying to get butts in seats.
People are by and large kind of broke right now. Generally, when we tighten our belts, it’s the extraneous (read: fun) stuff that we forgo first, and for a lot of people, that includes paying to see a movie in the theater when you’re already paying for Netflix, and Hulu, and HBO Max, and Paramount+, and Peacock, and, and, and. But it’s also true that when people are struggling, they tend to flock to escapist entertainment: the worlds of Pandora and Wakanda. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get them to see something new. M3GAN and the literal M3GANs climbed the Empire State Building to promise us entertainment, and they’ve already made back their budget and earned a sequel. Sometimes, fun pays.
59 Comments
reminder to Hollywood about why people actually go to the moviesTo see famous people’s children on screen, right?
I stan nepo babies.
Stan Nepo: Attorney to the children of the stars!
Lost a part to some newb whose parents don’t command $100 mil + box office returns? I’LL SUE FOR YOU!
I’ll fight hard to get you the money you…kinda deserve…well, not really.
Stan Nepo Jr., technically. His dad got him in the business.
I stab them!
Everyone needs a hobby!
Jesus fucking Christ can we have one goddamn pop culture discussion without the fucking default topic du jour being trotted out for the millionth time? So what if Williams is one, this has nothing to do with the whole “importance of fun in movies” premise of the article.
I don’t know. I heard she’s a wife guy
I can’t wait until guy wifes become a thing, I’m all in on being the guy of a guy wife.
thatsthejoke.gif, bruh
Jesus fucking Christ can we have one goddamn pop culture discussion
without the fucking default topic du jour being trotted out for the
millionth time?-The A.V. Club
No (*^‿*)♡
Dismissed for use of “bruh.”
100%. If I can’t trace the lineage of the actors on screen, I won’t bother watching. But I’ll be sure to note my disdain on every AVClub thread I can fine.#SelfRighteousInterneting
I take into consideration if they star is a nepotism hire, yes. I don’t particularly want to reward it.
I love that the internet has suddenly discovered this is a thing, when frankly, it has always been a thing.I bet the Coppola family is happy that TikTok wasn’t around in the 80s and 90s.
Well 80% of on TikTok are about 15, so yeah they did just discover it. I’ve been complaining about it at least since I could look people up on Wikipedia, and more times than not, every actor I looked up had hyperlinks to their parents.
Is M3GAN sitting down or is she freakishly smaller than the small child she “protects”?
Both? She is sitting down, but she’s also shorter than the other girl (albeit not freakishly).
well…I guess I could suspend disbelief when V.I.C.I. the small wonder lifted a couch with three people on it one-handed.
I was under the impression M3GAN was inches taller than Violet McGraw.
Was she wearing those rave shoes?
Could be the angle of the screenshots, but she looks smaller to me.
No one’s
fun anymore. What ever happened to fun?
God. I’m so bored I could die.
-lexi featherston
If their viral marketing is so great, how come I never heard of M1GAN and M2GAN?
The sequel should be M4GAN, MEG4N or M3G4N?
2 Fast 2 M3GAN3
In that case 4 would be MEC4N
M1GRAINE
In the third one she will Tokyo drift
Usually have to pay extra for that!
M’Again
M3.5GAN: Electric Fucking Boogaloo
M3GAN 2: M3 AGAIN!
Nice. Have a star.
…and a cookie
The joke was “The Madness of King George” was going to be called “The Madness of George III” after the play it was based on, but they felt audiences would think it was sequel to something they hadn’t seen.
Everyone knows tech products aren’t really practical until the third version.
seems like once a month for the last 10 years there’s a movie that people are like “FINALLY movies are actually FUN again.”
Isn’t that Nicole Kidman?
Seems like it ignores the fact that most people find Marvel movies fun.
It’s like those AV Club album reviews that announce “melody is back in fashion”, raving about a set of tuneless dirges by some band or other.
Fun, like comedy, is now legal.
People are by and large kind of broke right now. Generally, when we tighten our belts, it’s the extraneous (read: fun) stuff that we forgo first, and for a lot of people, that includes paying to see a movie in the theater when you’re already paying for Netflix, and Hulu, and HBO Max, and Paramount+, and Peacock..This was the winter break that my oldest discovered that pretty much every movie on his list of movies to watch he can get for free at our local library on DVD. No more bugging mom and dad about paying money to stream the ever increasing number of movies that aren’t available as part of our streaming subscriptions.
“This was the winter break that my oldest discovered that pretty much every movie on his list of movies to watch he can get for free at our local library on DVD.”
The library is such a great, unexpected source of movies.“No more bugging mom and dad about paying money to stream the ever increasing number of movies that aren’t available as part of our streaming subscriptions.”
Are you familiar with Kanopy and Hoopla? They’re the streaming version of a library (literally, you access it with your library card), with free loans and everything.
Violent Night already reminded everyone about fun.It’s honestly kinda weird how the movie about Santa murdering a bunch of bad guys was the most fun movie in theaters at Christmas by default.Avatar and Black Panther were great, but I wouldn’t call them fun, and even Puss In Boots, while quite good, was about our hero desperately trying to avoid the cold black grip of death.
You guys need to stop watching movies you don’t find fun. Entertainment is supposed to be entertaining, why are you all having a miserable time?
Filmmaking is an art actually
A lot fewer people saw Violent Night, M3GAN tripled their opening weekend and is posed to beat their total box office total by at least the same multiplier. It may have been fun, but it didn’t get nearly as many people to theaters.
And yet, it kinda sucked. I worry that this is going to usher in an era of movies that have been ruined chasing a PG-13 rating. Because holy hell was M3GAN ruined chasing the PG-13 rating…
“usher in an era” horror movies have ruined themselves by sticking to pg-13 to try to get a bigger audience forever. I guarantee you it was happening decades before you were born.
I guarantee you it wasn’t because they didn’t have that rating before I was born…
While I 100% want MORE hard R horror movies, or just hard R movies in general. The thing is, PG-13 has been pushed so far you can get away with about 80% of what an R rated movie was 20 years ago. Like the difference between an Pg-13 cut and an R cut can be as little as a cuss word or one or two more violent scenes.
Damn it, you got me again Nu-AV Club. I expected a bit more talk about the movie itself rather than just its marketing and surface-level comparisons to few other movies that were released around the same time.I missed most of the marketing around M3GAN but was excited for it based on the trailer and loving Malignant (same writer) and Housebound (same director). Maybe my expectations were too high and it was unrealistic of me to expect something as bonkers as Malignant, but it was a bit of a letdown that most of the best moments were shown in the trailer. Still a good time though and I laughed quite a bit. I’m glad it’s doing well and hope it means we get more good, fun horror movies.
“It’s not that this film is particularly good or entertaining, the supporters say, but that if you don’t see this big important film, there will only be fewer big important films.”I’m sorry what?????????? what?????????? now you’re complaining about this??
“M3GAN boldly asks: remember fun?”The audience boldly asks: remember Barbarian?
Lesson that should be learned: People want to be entertained and you need to convince them that your movie will do thatLesson that will be learned: MORE TIKTOK DANCES