Your new best friend is back! After the viral success of M3GAN, the horror movie is getting a sequel — and Allison Williams is set to return as her remorseful creator.
M3GAN became a viral hit months before its January 2023 release, in part because of a scene in the trailer that showed the robot doll pausing her murder spree for a dance break. One popular meme suggested that M3GAN is a “yassified” version of Annabelle, the haunted doll from the Conjuring franchise.
While the film was the brunt of many social media jokes, it quickly became a hit at the box office, earning more than $100 million in its first month of release and finishing its opening weekend in second place behind Avatar: The Way of Water.
The movie follows Gemma (Williams), a roboticist who becomes the guardian of her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), after Cady’s parents die in a car crash. The career-focused Gemma has trouble connecting with Cady until she introduces her to her latest creation: the Model 3 Generative Android, or M3GAN, for short.
Cady and M3GAN hit it off right away, but Gemma soon realizes that her niece is getting too close to the robot girl for comfort, and authorities start to notice that bodies are piling up. When the film ends, M3GAN — spoiler alert — is seemingly dead, but the final shot reveals that her consciousness has taken over the camera in Gemma’s smart home.
Though M3GAN is responsible for multiple deaths, Williams joked that the robot does have a few redeeming qualities. “She is very loyal. She is,” the Girls alum told BuzzFeed in January 2023. “She’s a good diagnostician and analyst of vital signs. She is watchful, and she is a gifted performer.”
On a more serious note, the Get Out actress explained that the birth of her own son, Arlo, made portraying the semi-neglectful Gemma more difficult. The Yale University alum welcomed her first child with fiancé Alexander Dreymon in late 2021.
“Some of those scenes, like when [Gemma is] sort of quasi-manipulating [Cady] into going to the presentation, even though she’s had an injury, that was one of the hardest scenes I had to film because it felt wrong. I felt terrible inside,” Williams told Insider in January 2023. “But Gemma has a different incentive structure than I do. And so that’s just one of those moments that you have to navigate.”
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