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How M3GAN became Hollywood’s first TikTok blockbuster

The M3GAN dancers take to the red carpet in Hollywood - AFP
The M3GAN dancers take to the red carpet in Hollywood - AFP

Until the trailer dropped for M3GAN, few predicted that this campy-looking horror-comedy about a murderous robotic doll would storm the January box office to become easily the biggest multiplex hit of 2023 so far. But there was one element teased that helped it catch on like wildfire: a TikTok-inspired dance routine with the title character twirling in a corridor, and doing an aerial cartwheel, before embarking on her now iconic rampage.

M3GAN isn’t a sequel – the title stands for “Model 3 Generative Android” – but has easily had the impact to spawn them. The film’s director, 44-year-old Kiwi Gerard Johnstone, took some persuading that they should give her dance away – the moment that inspired a thousand homemade imitations by young teens, and proved a goldmine for Universal’s marketing department. Off a production budget of just $12 million, this co-production between the studio’s horror outfits Blumhouse (Get Out, Insidious) and James Wan’s Atomic Monster (Malignant, the Annabelle series) has already grossed a tidy $146.8m (and counting) worldwide.

“No one mentioned the term viral at any moment while making this movie,” Johnstone tells me over Zoom. “We’d been shooting in the middle of the pandemic, in Montreal and New Zealand, and it just felt like the end of the world. We weren’t even sure if movies would be back – Netflix and streaming services were really taking off. I figured it would go to streaming.”

“Also, I was pressed up against a really small monitor shooting it, and it didn’t feel like this was going to be a big theatrical experience. For people to be referencing M3GAN as one of the reasons that movies are back… it’s phenomenal. My expectations have been surpassed a thousand times over.”

The original concept for M3GAN was cooked up by Wan, the madly prolific horror auteur whose credits include directing Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring and Malignant. His pitch was “Annabelle meets The Terminator”, “and the script was very much that,” says Johnstone.

Sundry other reference points came into the mix, including Paul Verhoeven’s films – both the cyborg showdowns of Robocop and the femme fatale scheming of Basic Instinct – but also Curtis Hanson’s psychothriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), with its story of a caregiver going to, shall we say, harsh extremes. Even Under the Skin (2013), with the hypnotic aura of Scarlett Johansson and her profoundly disturbing attack in the woods, had a role in shaping M3GAN’s fierce attitude.

But Johnstone’s background in comedy became the prompt for an all-important tonal shift. Before long, this state-of-the-art poppet was not only concocting ever-more-diabolical ways to safeguard her tweenage owner, played by Violet McGraw, but launching into auto-tuned renditions of Sia songs, and becoming generally hilarious.

“M3GAN was a great gift,” says Johnstone, “just in terms of the amount of things she can do – if she’s generative, and she’s learning, she can do anything. She’s an iPad with legs. That informs her personality.

“I didn’t know how much of an icon she would be – but I wanted her to be iconic. So the costume was really important – the degree to which her outfit would feel kind of costumey but also very classy and elegant. She’s meant to cost $10,000 in the movie – in real life, she would be more like $200,000, of course. But even with the lower price tag, she had to be appealing. She’s like a digital enchantress.”

'She’s like a digital enchantress': the film satirises Gen Z culture - Geoffrey Short/Universal Pictures
'She’s like a digital enchantress': the film satirises Gen Z culture - Geoffrey Short/Universal Pictures

She’s been described as looking eerily like an Olsen twin, though curiously the sisters were not on the mood board for Johnstone or his costume designer, Daniel Cruden, at all. She couldn’t look too much like the twins from The Shining – so out went Peter Pan collars. And no overalls, because then she’d be too much like Chucky from the Child’s Play series.

Instead, they looked at classic Gucci, and the kind of sophisticated looks that made Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Kim Novak famous.

“I also have to give a lot of credit to Morot, the company that designed the doll,” says Johnstone. “They are some of the best people in the world at making realistic prosthetic doubles, so they were able to make her look more real than any doll or any robot that had been on screen before, and we kind of just went further into that uncanny valley.”

The fusion of their work with the live-action performance of 11-year-old Amie Donald, and some CGI embellishment, is remarkably seamless given the film’s low-ish cost. “The methodology was, we don’t have the budget to make an actual robot. So she’s a state-of-the-art animatronic doll from the chin upwards. She has all these different micro-expressions in her face that were controlled by three people. Her mouth would be trained to lip-sync with about 60 per cent efficiency to her dialogue, controlled by these remotes.”

'M3GAN was a great gift': the life-like doll was built using CGI and elaborate prosthetics - Universal Pictures
'M3GAN was a great gift': the life-like doll was built using CGI and elaborate prosthetics - Universal Pictures

“Then we hit the jackpot on set with Amie, who’s a dancer, a contortionist, a martial artist. But also a crazily good young actress, who could do three-page dialogue scenes with Allison Williams without forgetting a line.”

According to Johnstone, the movie was never going to be hard, gory horror, and already felt close enough to the tone of a teen-friendly PG-13 flick that getting it down to that level of certification – clearly crucial to win over the desired demographic – only needed minor surgery. It also made the film better. “When we made the decision to commit to PG-13, [Universal] gave me the opportunity to reshoot a few things, and shoot some other things that made those scenes scarier.”

“It was a 30-day shoot – you’re dealing with animals, puppets – so I was devastated by the schedule of this movie. To make horror you really need time to craft those sequences. One of the kill scenes in particular is so much more effective when it plays off camera now, and it’s all about sound design.”

It wasn’t gore that felt like a major sacrifice, but F-words – of which you’re only allowed one in a PG-13. “David, as the CEO of a toy company, was swearing like a sailor. That was one of the things I missed the most,” Johnstone recalls. That said, to award the prize of the single F-bomb to the character who gets it – a resentful school bully called Brandon, who’s just gone through a growth spurt and became sociopathic – was an inspired move.

Johnstone remembers being sent the first trailer for approval by Universal’s marketing team before he’d even finished editing, and being unsure whether they should tease her dancing. “They loved it, so pushed back. As a director, I’ve got enough on my plate, and it’s not my area of expertise. So I put my trust in them, and I’m so glad I did. I feel so lucky to be part of one of the most genius marketing campaigns in the history of film. They just threw everything behind it – no opportunity was left unturned.”

As the release date neared, with M3GAN fever flooding TikTok, some guerrilla gambits sprung up – especially hiring a flash-mob of eight dancers, all clad as identikit M3GANs, to recreate her routine on red carpets and football fields and get snapped on rooftops. Driving the internet wild, it’s easily the best meme-ification of a film’s dance moment since Oscar Isaac got down and grooved in Ex Machina.

“I knew what TikTok was, but only vaguely,” Johnstone admits. “It was a platform where people dance a lot, or do impersonations of Donald Trump. That was my awareness – I’m in my 40s and a Luddite when it comes to this stuff. If I started to pander to that crowd, I would fall on my face so quickly!”

According to Universal’s head of marketing Michael Moses, who was interviewed about the film’s success on Matt Belloni’s podcast The Town, there’s a particular science to riding this kind of wave. Releasing it in January, when audiences have often started to get tired of lengthy prestige bait and are ready for something fun and fresh, was quick thinking.

“It’s not a business plan,” said Moses of watching a campaign like this go viral. “Trying to bet on virality… it’s something you can prepare for, but you can’t actually create.” Showcasing M3GAN’s dance so early in their promotional run, they created the conditions for this explosion of interest, just maybe, to happen. And then it did. As soon as the producers saw it, they were all guns blazing to get a sequel green-lit, for which a release date – Jan 17, 2025 – has just been announced. It’s currently entitled M3GAN 2.0 – because while MEG4N would look great on the poster, how the heck would you say it?


M3GAN is in cinemas now