Will ‘M3GAN’ Become a Trilogy? Allison Williams Hopes So

M3GAN 2.0 star-producer Allison Williams welcomes the opportunity to burn the candle at both ends.

Besides the June 27 sequel to Gerard Johnstone’s 2023 smash hit about a murderous android doll, Williams has wrapped two other films as star and producer, including the latest Colleen Hoover adaptation, Regretting You, and the murder mystery, Kill Me. (She’s also an EP on the upcoming M3GAN spinoff, Soulm8te.) Williams’ peers regard her as a natural problem solver, and so it’s currently only a question of when, not if, she starts a production banner of her own.

“I’ve been thinking about [starting a production company] lately, especially now that, as a kind of rule, I don’t really do anything that I’m not also producing,” Williams tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of M3GAN 2.0’s June 27 theatrical release. “I feel so lucky to be in a position where I can have a seat at every production meeting table and a position on every email thread. And then I also get to do my job on camera, so it feels like I won the lottery in a way.”

Johnstone’s sequel, M3GAN 2.0, picks up two years after Williams’ roboticist character, Gemma Forrester, and her adoptive niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), narrowly neutralized the former’s AI-driven creation after she killed four people and a dog. Based on a subplot from the first film, Gemma’s tech has been leaked to a defense contractor that created a military-grade robot named AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), and now that entity has also gone rogue, forcing Gemma and co. to reluctantly reawaken M3GAN as their first-and-only line of defense. 

The first film’s marketing campaign created a viral sensation courtesy of M3GAN’s dance moves en route to a kill, and the decision of whether to show that tonal deviation was heavily debated by producers and marketers at the time. The sequel has plenty of the same horror-comedy elements that delighted audiences a couple years ago, but there’s also a major action upgrade that resembles the paths that Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day took from their predecessors. 

“That was not even something that we had explicitly set out to do, but it just felt obvious to Gerard that if there’s a second doll, then we are going to be in that genre now,” Williams says. “There’s this meta humor to the idea of Gemma suddenly being in an action movie. It’s ridiculous in a hopefully fun way, and we had a lot of fun finding the humor in the mere fact of it.”

In early 2023, the first film ultimately grossed nearly $182 million against a $12 million budget, and it even received its own spoof on SNL. Williams cameoed in the sketch, and a joke was quickly made about her highly discussed sex scene from the fourth season premiere of her hit HBO series, Girls. The scene may be over a decade old now, but Williams didn’t mind reigniting the talk around that intimate exchange, especially as Girls was already heading toward a new wave of viewership.

“I felt so excited and honored to have made a movie that’s worthy of SNL‘s treatment, and first and foremost, I am always very happy to make fun of myself,” Williams admits. “Girls is having this incredible resurgence, and I get to talk about it all the time again, as if it’s still airing. So it’s totally fair game, and the SNL sketch was so, so funny.”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Williams also discusses her dreams of completing a M3GAN trilogy, as well as why her upcoming romantic dramedy, Regretting You, feels predestined.

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You previously told me that there was a lot of debate about whether to show M3GAN dancing in the trailer of the first movie, and you credited Universal’s marketing team for trusting their gut because that tone really struck a chord. Thus, did you sense more confidence from day one of M3GAN 2.0 since everyone understood the desired tone?

I feel like we had confidence in the tone, characters and story, but as a group of people who made this movie, we were racked with worry, effort and the desire to get it right in a way that would seem very unconfident. It was really just us desperately wanting to do right by the people who came out and supported the first movie, and the best way to do that was to put our heads down and try to put the success of the first movie out of our minds as crazy as that sounds. 

So we just focused on the things we know to be true about this world, and then we trusted the instincts of the people in the marketing department who arguably made the first movie what it was. But we still worried about every single little thing because she’s our baby. (Laugh.) It’s our job to try to get it all right, even more so given the incredible amount of support we got the first time around.

Part of the reason I asked that question was because I revisited the first movie, and it feels like it was torn between being a techno-horror film and a horror-comedy. But M3GAN 2.0 knows it’s an action-packed horror-comedy from the very first frame.

Yes, I think so. In our early conversations about this movie, everyone unanimously knew that a second doll was the only way to go. But from there, I really do credit a lot of Gerard’s [Johnstone] full-on instincts about what that meant. Gerard is the only person on the planet who could watch the first five minutes of the movie and be able to anticipate the final five minutes of the movie. For everyone else, it’s just a total ride, and you’d have no way to predict where it’s all going. 

So we knew that the characters and the tone from the first movie worked, and that definitely gives you a little bit of confidence in terms of not problem solving for those things anymore. You’re sort of beyond that, but we weren’t sure about anything else, which is why we tried our very best to perfect all of the newer elements in the movie, including the fact that we were moving into the action genre. That was not even something that we had explicitly set out to do, but it just felt obvious to Gerard that if there’s a second doll, we are going to be in that genre now. So we let ourselves enjoy that experience.

As we see in the final trailer, you, as Gemma, get in on the action. Was this type of fight choreography a welcomed change for you? 

It was definitely a new challenge. I’ve done stunts before, and I’ve even done some amount of fighting in things before, but never to this extent. I’ve never had to learn how to box or train for a movie in this exact way before, and it was so fun. There’s this meta humor to the idea of Gemma suddenly being in an action movie. It’s ridiculous in a hopefully fun way, and we had a lot of fun finding the humor in the mere fact of it while it was happening. It’s as unbelievable and as random a series of events for Gemma as it is for an audience watching the movie. So we just hoped that people would have as much fun with it as we did, but that didn’t mean I trained any less hard. If anything, I trained harder so that I wouldn’t hurt myself and so that I could do justice to what Gemma was doing. Without giving anything away, it had to be executed in a specific way in order to be maximally satisfying. 

The theme with these movies is that they’re actually very hard to pull off. To do it right, we have to forget about the camp and the meta commentary on the world we created in the first movie, and just take it all as seriously as we possibly can. When I am in scenes with M3GAN or playing the stakes of the movie, if I’m at all winking at this hilarious ride we’re on and the camp of it all, it doesn’t work anymore. So I was completely aware of the fact that the only successful version of this movie is one where we’re all just fully committed to this world and its stakes, and the execution of all of that is everything. It’s all we have. That makes for a really funny, unpredictable and unique dynamic from the first movie. The characters themselves can’t believe that they’re finding this to be their milieu, and they’re just going to make the best of it.

In December 2022, I asked you, Jason Blum and James Wan a bunch of AI questions without fully realizing that it was about to become one of the most prevalent topics of 2023, largely due to the labor strikes. How much did the audience’s greater awareness of AI and all its potential dangers impact the writing of this movie? 

It meant that we had to do much less explaining. We had to do very little, “This is what AI is, this is what a learning model is, this is what would make it dangerous.” So, in that way, it made it easier for us to tell the story that we were trying to tell. The existential worries about it are much more accessible to everybody at this point because they’ve been living with it and the eeriness of it for a while. Everyone can relate to that unsettling feeling of being listened to and watched by the tech in your house. So we aren’t explaining that phenomenon to people who are already living it, and you have to do much less table setting for the audience. You’re already in the same conversation.

The big difference is that it’s here. We aren’t dealing with hypotheticals anymore. “So, now what?” is really the prevailing sense in this movie. What are the ethics of the situation we find ourselves in? What do we do with the fact that this is our world now? We made all these decisions based on what felt convenient to us, and now we are living with the ramifications of it. There are big ethical conversations that we have not had the time or the discipline to have as a culture and a world, and that is also the world in which this movie takes place.

It picks right up from the conversation that everyone is having about the tech in their house and self-driving cars and their ethical ramifications. It’s exaggerated like it was in the first movie, and it’s taken out of its context that we know it from, but in doing so, maybe we’re sharpening the conversation that people are having about it already. Everyone talks or complains about this stuff. No shade to Google, but I feel like the new thing people say is: “I ChatGPT’d it.” And people often say “he said” or “she said” based on the voice that they’ve chosen for it. So it’s happening, and it’s everywhere.

Of the people who are doing the actual work, I’m sure many of them are well intentioned, but their superiors who are funneling billions of dollars toward AI have yet to display an ounce of empathy from where I’m sitting. Silicon Valley tends to shoot first and ask questions later, and I don’t have faith that they or their clients are being good parents to AI. Do you think the Gemmas of the real world are already fighting a losing battle? 

Well, the thing is that it’s now up to us. If it’s made its way into our homes and we are using this technology freely, then I think the responsibility to think critically about it is shared by us, not just the people who brought it into the world. It would have been their responsibility at the time when we made the first movie, but now I feel like that ship has sailed. It’s now on the rest of us to interrogate all of these things in our daily lives and in our own relationships, and to see what we think our personal responsibilities are. Of course, at the end of the day, there will be some combination of regulation and personal best practices and ethics, but I just don’t think we can lean heavily enough on the fact that each of us ultimately has to think critically about all of this. At one point, we might’ve been able to avoid it, but I would say it is morally imperative at this point.

We talked previously about Gemma having the look of someone who spends all her time in a lab, and now that she’s a published author and the public face of AI regulation, she’s had a “glow-up” as they say. Do you think she feels comfortable in her new presentation? 

No, I don’t. At her core, she still feels very much like the person in the first movie, and this public persona is one that she has formed out of necessity and with a lot of help. There’s zero chance that she selects the clothes that she wears on talk shows and stuff like that. I mean, we all get help in that way, but Gemma in particular would have very strange instincts about what the right thing would be to do or wear or say — or how to comport herself in those situations. When she’s at work in the lab, that is her most authentic self. She’s in something that most closely resembles a flow state, and so I can imagine that this new role is pretty uncomfortable for her.

I always knew you’d make an effective producer based on how detail oriented and studious you seem to be off screen. Do you see yourself setting up your own banner in the near future? 

Thank you for saying that. I’ve been thinking about it lately, especially now that, as a kind of rule, I don’t really do anything that I’m not also producing. But I don’t have bandwidth currently to do it, ironically, because I’m doing double duty on at least three movies right now. M3GAN 2.0 is done, and the other two [Regretting You and Kill Me] are getting finished as we speak. But maybe someday, though. I love doing the [acting-producing] combination, and I love doing it exactly how I’ve been doing it, without having to worry about raising money or running a company. But it would be a really fun adventure to do that at some point in the near future. I could definitely see that happening so that I can streamline the workflow of all of it. It’s a lot of work, and I absolutely love it. I feel so lucky to be in a position where I can have a seat at every production meeting table and a position on every email thread. I’m always like, “Put me on everything. I want to know everything, seriously.” And then I also get to do my job on camera, so it feels like I won the lottery in a way.

In January 2023, when SNL pitched the “M3GAN 2.0” sketch to you, were you immediately on board with it? Or did the Girls joke give you pause since you already had to live through that joke cycle once before? 

I was immediately on board. I felt so excited and honored to have made a movie that’s worthy of SNL‘s treatment, and first and foremost, I am always very happy to make fun of myself. There’s no sense punching down at something that has been in someone’s work past because that’s just needlessly cruel. But Girls is having this incredible resurgence, and I get to talk about it all the time again, as if it’s still airing. So it’s totally fair game, and the SNL sketch was so, so funny. The minute I heard about it, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I have to make this work. I have to figure out a way to be there.”

Hollywood loves the “rule of three,” so how much forethought has the M3GAN brain trust given M3GAN 3.0? 

We don’t want to presume anything, but I would say a lot [of forethought]. (Laughs.) That’s all I’m going to say. We love to dream; that’s why we’re all in this business. We have big aspirations of big dreams, and I certainly don’t feel like I’m done making these movies with these people and this tonal landscape and the subject matter. So, yeah, I have been dreaming of a third, for sure.

Lastly, 2025 is a big year for you. Besides M3GAN 2.0, Regretting You is coming out in the fall. What itch did that movie scratch?

I knew about Colleen Hoover as an author, and I’ve read her books before, but I hadn’t read this book yet. I’ve also known Josh Boone for many years. We had a general meeting at the very beginning of my career. I think it was right after he’d made The Fault in Our Stars, and then we lost touch with each other. So when his name showed up in my inbox again after all these years, there was something about it that felt like kismet. I have also almost been in five movies with Dave Franco that haven’t worked out. So it felt like we were cosmically destined to work together at some point, and it just had never come to fruition until now. I always pay very close attention to sentiments like that, and all of that took place before I had even read the book, the script and got to know the character and the world. That’s when I got much more specifically excited about the project. 

I’ve never done anything in this genre. I am new to the “rom-dram” with some comedy and a family situation, for lack of a better phrase, at the core. So I was really enticed by the newness of it all, because I have lived pretty firmly in thriller-ville for years now. It felt really exciting and intimidating and, ironically, thrilling to leave that behind and move into a new genre where I don’t have the same amount of experience. So there were only yes-reasons, and I really didn’t hesitate, which is often true about the things I choose to do. They feel very obvious to me, and there’s just a certain amount of gut instinct.

When I read the script, it felt like the kind of movie that I’m always reaching for but never finding. And if that’s something that I am seeking, it might also be something that other people are looking for, too. At that point, Josh had already started thinking about Mckenna [Grace] to play my daughter, and that was another very compelling piece of convincing evidence to make me want to do it even more. She’s superbly talented, and it just got better and better from there. 

It was among the more harmonious, delightful, fun, easy, familial, professional experiences I’ve ever had, and that was such a relief because the subject matter is tough. I’m being vague because I don’t want to spoil anything, and tomorrow, I have a Zoom about the trailer. I don’t yet know how they’re choosing to market it, and I’m a day away from knowing. So I’m speaking very carefully to not step on anyone at Paramount.

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M3GAN 2.0 releases June 27 in movie theaters nationwide.