With that said, the trailer isn’t so much about the plot as much as it is the tone. For the first movie, Johnstone and Cooper swerved between character drama, PG-13 Blumhouse violence, and broad humor, not always effectively. Yet the movie became a hit thanks to the studio’s successful marketing campaign. Videos spread over the internet with a host of identical M3GANs at New York landmarks or appearing in the audience of late night talk shows. The late-movie dance sequence even spread over to TikTok with teens copying the killer doll’s moves.
Important as hip humor may be to Blumhouse’s advertising, it actually played a relatively small part in that movie. So it’s hard to say if the sequel intends to lean right into silliness or if it’s just another marketing misdirect. Certainly, the first movie had characters like the large bearded man in a M3GAN wig seen in the sequel trailer and certainly lines like “hold onto your vaginas” aren’t completely out of place. But will the new movie lean this heavily on self-aware humor?
The trailer doesn’t give us enough information to know for sure. However, the trailer does completely reveal what the new M3GAN will look like and how she’ll fight with Amelia. By the end of the trailer, we’ve seen M3GAN transferred from her plastic body and placed in an upgraded version of her old body, not just taller (Amie Donald has aged, after all), but also stronger and with advanced weaponry. In fact, the trailer appears to show the movie’s climax in which M3GAN and Amelia put on bright futuristic armor and have a laser battle.
Which is, unfortunately, one thing from Terminator 2 that M3GAN 2.0 cannot replicate. For that movie’s first viewers in 1991, the reveal that the T-800 was pulling out a gun to shoot the T-100 and not John Connor was an incredible surprise. Of course studio Tri-Star quickly spoiled that reveal in its marketing materials, robbing most viewers of that experience.
So if not even Jim Cameron could stop a studio from giving away a big twist, we certainly would be shocked if the savvy marketers at Blumhouse could keep the same secret. In fact, it seems the point of the marketing to emphasize that this time there is a bigger, badder robot, and it’s going to be a Slay Off.
M3GAN 2.0 dances into theaters on June 27, 2025.
