The film industry is a world of highs and lows. Sometimes you’re cruising and releasing hit after hit, other times you have a surprising dud that turns a surefire franchise into yesterday’s news. Right now, Universal is staring at the latter of these two situations in the aftermath of “M3GAN 2.0″ and the spin-off film that was slated for release. Now there’s been a shake-up that’s unique even in these tumultuous Hollywood days.
When “M3GAN“ hit theaters in 2022, the film was a surprisingly strong success for Blumhouse, Atomic Monster, and Universal Pictures. The horror/comedy took home over $180 million dollars on a budget of just $12 million. It was exactly the kind of hit that the industry needed post COVID; a relatively cheap to make genre film that made back over ten times its budget off of a brand new IP. Blumhouse smelled franchise potential and greenlit a sequel and a spin-off.
The sequel, “M3GAN 2.0″ infamously fell on its face commercially by switching from horror to action and made less than $40 million. Even the founder of Blumhouse Jason Blum commented on their mistakes. “We classically over-thought how powerful people’s engagement was with her,” Blum said in reference to changing genres and her villainous personality.
The failure of the film was so cataclysmic that the already completed spinoff “SOULM8TE” has been removed from the Universal release calendar less than a month before it was supposed to premiere. The film was scheduled for a January 8th, 2026 bow, which is now not happening. Universal is reportedly trying to shop the film around to see if someone else will handle distribution. The question is whether or not the brand is so poisoned that another company will actually take a gamble on distributing it.
We’ve seen things like this before where a company might delay a film leading up to release or scrap something entirely, but not this close to release. We’ll update you if we hear anything further about the future of “SOULM8TE.”
