I'm Excited For M3GAN 2.0 After Learning The Plot, But There's One Thing That Bums Me Out

In director Rob Reiner's Misery, Kathy Bates' Annie Wilkes famously registers a passionate complaint about cliffhangers. She explains that she would go to the cinema as a kid to watch serials on the big screen, and she would find herself deeply upset when filmmakers would conclude a story with a hero in inescapable peril... but would then cheat and present an easy solution for the character at the start of the next chapter. Today, I found myself reflecting on this great scene while learning about the plot of the upcoming horror movie M3GAN 2.0.

Universal Pictures hosted a presentation this afternoon at CinemaCon – the annual convention for movie theater owners – and one of the big highlights of the show were revelations about the sequel to M3GAN (which is arriving in theaters this summer). A brand new trailer for the film was screened, and it revealed what we can expect from the story: despite the Model 3 Generative Android programming having been destroyed, another autonomous creation has been built with it – named Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno) – and the authorities need help from Gemma Forrester (Allison Williams) to stop it after it goes rogue and starts killing everyone that had a hand in creating it. In order to accomplish this, Gemma not only brings back the original programming, but gives the titular technological marvel some major upgrades, including making her both bigger and stronger.

It's a move that comes straight from the Terminator 2: Judgement Day playbook: when a new and more powerful villain arrives, help is needed from the old villain in order to survive. It's not exactly an original sequel approach, but it's certainly been proven to be an effective one.

In a vacuum, I actually really liked what was shown from M3GAN 2.0, as the footage featured more of the same fun sensibility from the original (like M3GAN's first resurrected body being of the plastic, Teletubby-esque variety) and plenty of gnarly horror (one shot featured Amelia standing behind a dead body in a bathtub using a saw to chop off its arm). What I'm disappointed with, however, is that the 2025 movie seems to have completed ignored the sequel teaser from the end of its predecessor.

For those who don't recall, M3GAN ended with Gemma, Cady (Violet McGraw), Tess (Jen Van Epps) and Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) happy to be alive following their encounter with the eponymous homicidal robot... but there was a hint that the programming wasn't destroyed; it simply changed forms. The final shot of the film features Elise, the Alexa-esque smart home device Gemma owns, turning itself on, suggesting that M3GAN had hijacked the system and had become a wholly digital terror.

I assumed that she would eventually get back into a body in a sequel (a big part of the whole charm is the "killer doll" aspect), but I at least hoped that M3GAN 2.0 would start with the all-digital approach and move forward from there. Instead, it seems that the follow-up is starting with a different idea, and while it's not a bad idea, I am feeling a touch Annie Wilkes about it.

UPDATE: The morning after the trailer debuted at CinemaCon, Universal let the M3GAN 2.0 promo loose upon the world at large.

Check Out The Official M3GAN 2.0 Trailer!

In addition to the aforementioned Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jen Van Epps, and Ivanna Sakhno, M3GAN 2.0 also stars Timm Sharp, Aristotle Athari, and Jemaine Clement, and the film will be arriving in theaters domestically on June 27. It's one of our most anticipated summer releases among the staff at CinemaBlend, so stay tuned in the coming weeks as more about the highly anticipated sequel arrives online.