Karla Sofía Gascón is back in the saddle after her Oscar-nominated work in Emilia Perez became the flashpoint of last awards season.
The Hollywood Reporter has the first look at Gascón in the 19th century-set Spanish western Trinidad, directed by Laura Alvea and José Ortuño.
The English-language feature filmed in recent months in the Canary Islands, but is set primarily in the United States. It stars Gabriela Andrada as Trinidad, a woman who flees persecution in Spain for the wild west. Along the way, she earns renowned for her skills with weapons, but also becomes a target of enemies, such as the widow Bronson (Gascón).
The actress describes her character as an “ultra-conservitive woman” who is “a kind of female Darth Vader with five children to protect and manipulate.”
“She hates immigration, even though she’s an immigrant herself, with deeply patriarchal values,” Gascón tells THR. “She’s anti-feminist and opposed to social progress, although she has always been a fighter and has earned the respect, even as a woman, of the people who operate on a foundation of deception. A kind of female Darth Vader.”
The team behind the $12 million film knew Gascón’s work from Emilia Perez, which made her an international star and an Oscar frontrunner before her best actress campaign crumbled after controversial tweets from the actress resurfaced.
“That her next role would be that of a villain seemed almost poetic to me, so it was a personal choice: her bilingual presence, the intensity she brings, and that ambiguous energy the character needs did the rest,” says Silvia Carvalho da Costa, founder of ISII Group, which is backing the project.
Carvalho da Costa took the controversy surrounding Gascón into account when casting her in the film, noting, “We’ve all been heroes in someone’s story and villains in someone else’s.”
Adds the producer: “I know Karla: in addition to being a great actress, she is, for me, a great person, and that outweighed any past controversy.”
As for Gascón, she is trying to move on after the controversy surrounding her Oscars season. Says the actress: “I can’t control the interpretations others make of me or the things they say, often taken out of context, manipulated, or simply false. What I can do—and will continue to do—is demonstrate, through my work and my daily attitude, that I am not the person some have tried to project.”
Distribution plans for the project will be announced at a later date.
[This story contains spoilers from 28 Years Later.]
There were a number of memorable characters in 28 Years Later, such as the reclusive Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), adventurous 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) and the mysterious cult leader Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), who swoops in at the end.
But one character in particular captured the Internet’s imagination during the film’s $30 million opening weekend. Samson, AKA The Alpha Zombie played by Chi Lewis-Parry, won hearts and minds thanks to his hulking presence, his affinity for ripping off human heads, and, um, that prosthetic penis.
Filmmaker Danny Boyle tells The Hollywood Reporter there is indeed more Samson arriving in the sequel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
“The character you saw at the end of the first film, Jack O’Connell, he’s a major character in the second film, with Ralph Fiennes — and the big Samson guy,” Boyle says.
Sony shot 28 Years Later and The Bone Temple back-to-back, with Boyle directing the first installment and Candyman filmmaker Nia DaCosta stepping in for the second. Sony film boss Tom Rothman is high on both movies and is hopeful about a third installment that Boyle and his 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland are developing.
“I don’t really consider this a zombie film. I consider it an emotional drama in a harsh landscape,” Rothman says of the current 28 Years Later. “The next one is much more about man’s inhumanity to man.”
For now, Sony is focused on 28 Years Later’s continued theatrical run, where it has taken in $60 million globally, and then preparing for the January launch of Bone Temple. Spike will also be back for that feature, with an appearance from 28 Days Later star Cillian Murphy.
Bone Temple filmmaker DaCosta previously stepped into franchise fare with Marvel Studios’ The Marvels. That project did not work critically or financially, and DaCosta has been open about knowing it was a Marvel Studios movie, not really her own. But with Bone Temple, Boyle and writer-producer Garland say DaCosta did indeed get to make her own film.
“I remember her saying, ‘I’m not going to make a Danny Boyle movie.’ She was absolutely clear about that. And she hasn’t,” says Boyle. “She’s made her own movie and it’s very strong. I think probably because of her experience, she knows what she wants to do now and how she wants to do it, and tells you up front.”
In the years since 28 Days Later, Garland has graduated from screenwriter to director of films such as Ex Machina and Civil War, which taught him to be hands-off while producing the 28 Years Later films. After all, he wouldn’t like someone telling him what to do on one of his own sets.
“I gave them the script. They said, ‘Yes, I want to make this film.’ And from that point, I had almost no involvement,” says Garland, who did not visit the set. “I think in both cases there were a couple of days I was there for rehearsals for some technical reasons, but after the rehearsal period, when the film had started principal photography, I wasn’t there.”
As for the future, Boyle has spent much of the press tour advocating for a third installment, which has not been greenlit. It’s something Rothman is hopeful for.
“I don’t want to put a jinx on it. But, with such great reviews, and such a strong start globally, we hope so,” says Rothman.
It’s hard to believe nearly a decade has passed since Pixar’s Coco, an original, music-infused fantastical yarn about a Mexican boy who travels to Land of the Dead, grossed nearly $800 million at the global box office to rank No. 11 on the year’s list of top-grossing films. That was in 2017, a time when no one could have anticipated it would be quickly followed by a dramatic downturn in the appetite for original animated fare.
For Pixar, that downturn hit a new tipping point with the debut of Elio over the June 20-22 weekend. The original summer tentpole, about an orphaned boy whose wish to be abducted by aliens comes true, debuted to a dismal $20.8 million domestically and $14 million overseas in what’s by far a record-low opening for the storied animation studio co-founded by the late Steve Jobs and later acquired by Disney.
Publicly, Disney execs are putting on a brave face and suggesting that Elio can rebound and find its stride, much as Pixar’s original animated film Elemental did in 2023 on its way to grossing nearly $500 million globally after a $29.6 million start, not adjusted for inflation. Elio boasts stellar audience exit scores and even stronger reviews. But internally, no one is kidding themselves or trying to sugarcoat the results. Ultimately, Elio may not even crack $300 million.
That doesn’t mean Disney and Pixar are waving the white flag of surrender and banishing original storytelling to the hinterlands. If anything, Elio shines a light on a course correction that was already underway, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.
Pixar is deliberately pivoting toward a more balanced mix of sequels and fresh IP. Disney leadership, including movie studios chief Alan Bergman, have advocated for a strategic return to franchise entries as a way to support original storytelling over the long-term. They don’t view new IP as one-offs, but as potential franchises. Inside Out and Coco are just two examples of new franchises that began as originals.
In June 2024, the record-shattering Inside Out 2 debuted to a huge $154 million on its way to becoming the top-grossing pic of the year, the top title ever for Pixar and the top animated movie of all time with more than $1.69 billion in worldwide ticket sales, not adjusted for inflation. Coco, meanwhile, spawned a park attraction, with a movie sequel in the works.
Elio was the sixth original Pixar film released since 2020 after Onward, Soul, Luca, Turning Red and Elemental.
Pixar’s upcoming slate includes the original film Hoppers and Toy Story 5, both set for release in 2026, followed by the original Gatto in June 2027 and the undated Incredibles 3 and Coco 2. Of Pixar’s 30 theatrical releases, only 9 have been sequels installments and one, Lightyear, a prequel. That hardly makes a Pixar sequel machine — even at its own peril.
Pixar has always been skittish about franchise building. While Toy Story 2 was its third movie, it took more than a decade to release Toy Story 3, and five years to make Cars 2. The gap between the seminal Finding Nemo and sequel Finding Dory was a dozen years. And in 2016, Pixar president Jim Morris said that after 2018’s Toy Story 4 in 2018 and 2019’s Incredibles 2 — both of which would earn more than $1 billion globally — the studio would return to its roots, excluding Inside Out 2. He wasn’t kidding.
Walt Disney Animation Studios, home of the blockbuster Frozen and Moana franchises, also pursues a healthy mix, and has released four original films in recent years despite the downturn: Encanto, Raya and the Last Dragon, Strange World and Wish.
Rivals Illumination Entertainment and DreamWorks Animation, both owned by Universal, are without a doubt more franchise-focused. A third of the titles Illumination has made are part of the multi-billion-dollar grossing Despicable Me and Minions series, while it quickly turned Sing and The Secret Life of Pets into franchises. It is also in the Dr. Seuss business and now, Mario. DWA, the company founded by former chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, has feasted on a diet of Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda.
During the pandemic years — even when cinemas were back up and running — the regime led by then-Disney CEO Bob Chapek decided to send three Pixar titles straight to Disney+ domestically — Turning Red, Luca and the Oscar-winning Soul (all three were considered streaming hits). The controversial decision was slammed for training families to wait to watch younger-skewing family films in the home; a debate which ranges to this day, particularly when it comes to untested titles such as Elio. They might have been right. Among all animated original films from any Hollywood studio, only three have opened north of $20 million domestically in the post-pandemic era; Elio, 2021’s Encanto ($27.1 million) and 2023’s Elemental, ($29.6 million), all from the Disney empire.
That’s not to say PG movies haven’t worked. In fact, they’ve fueled much of the post-COVID recovery. But they’ve either been live-action adaptations of animated films — look no further than 2025 summer blockbusters Lilo & Stitch from Disney and How to Train Your Dragon from Universal; live-action properties based on branded IP such as Warner Bros.’ A Minecraft Movie, the top-grossing film of 2025 to date with more than $954 million in ticket sales, or the animated video game adaptation The Super Mario Bros Mario Movie, which earned a stunning $1.36 billion in 2023. And the list of last year’s top global grossers was led by Inside Out 2, while Moana 2 took third place with $1.05 billion, followed by Illumination’s Despicable Me 4 ($959 million).
Live-action adaptations of classic animated films such as Dragon or Lilo play to both families and Gen Zers or Millennials, thanks to the nostalgia factor. Elio lacked any such advantage and is having trouble connecting with a wide audience, likely due to skewing very young and being considered strictly a “kids” pic, which goes against the Pixar brand, according to box office pundits. Either way, it got lost in the wake of How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch, which has now crossed $900 million in global ticket sales (merchandise sales are in the billions).
“Notably, while PG rated movies have been the hero of the box office in the post-pandemic era, a PG rating doesn’t necessarily guarantee a massive opening weekend unless of course that PG rated film has known IP or is part of a franchise or a brand that’s well known such as Minecraft,” says Comscore chief box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “Elio will have to rely on great word-of-mouth based on amazing Rotten Tomatoes scores to keep the film in good stead over the next couple of weeks.”
Adds a source close the film, “While its opening numbers may not reflect its ambition, the film is a reminder of the kind of creative swing the studio still believes in, and that the industry still needs. As Pixar moves forward, it’s not abandoning originality — it’s looking for ways to launch it more effectively, while keeping beloved characters close at hand. In the end, the goal remains the same: tell stories that resonate across generations.”
Long before he was orchestrating Florence Pugh’s death-defying stunts for Marvel in Thunderbolts*, Jake Schreier was a commercial director with dreams of making the leap to the big screen.
He took a stroll down memory lane in Malta on Tuesday morning during a masterclass appearance at the Mediterrane Film Festival to recall how he made the difficult transition to feature films, and, in the process, he dished out some advice to aspiring auteurs in the audience.
The wide-ranging conversation — hosted at Malta’s historic Fort Ricasoli just steps away from where films like Gladiator and its sequel were shot — was moderated by filmmaker Joshua Cassar Gaspar, whose film The Theft of the Caravaggio is screening in competition at the fest. The 75-minute chat covered nearly all aspects of filmmaking as Schreier got quizzed on stunts (yes, that one), camera angles, visual effects, color grading, music selections, sound design, post-production, casting, editing and more. The career advice portion seemed to be the only thing he hasn’t talked about in the recent global press tour.
“My whole career, I’ve just been trying to work,” he explained, adding that during film school (where he was roommates with frequent Spider-Man franchise director Jon Watts, who is due here in Malta later this week), he zeroed in on making short films with friends before discovering another medium. “We sort of found out about commercials at the end of film school and were like, ‘Oh that’s something we could do.’ Because, again, it just was totally unclear how we were going to get to make a movie.”
Cassar Gaspar, left, and Schreier are pictured in conversation.
Courtesy of Mediterrane Film Festival
Schreier said commercials weren’t the most obvious training ground for feature films; however, the education of being on set prepared him for what was to come. “We never became very exalted commercial directors because we were very conceptually driven [asking], ‘What’s the story and how do we tell it?’ The function of commercials is a little bit more a stylized exercise and if you have a strong, enforced style that tends to play better in that medium. That was something I never really felt like I had.”
That said, he found plenty of work and it eventually paid off. “I can’t think of a single commercial that I did, even the really embarrassing ones that I don’t want to talk about, where I didn’t learn something. If you’re on a set and you’re doing something, there’s always some kind of thing that you can take from it,” said Schreier, whose other directing credits include Beef, Minx, Skeleton Crew, The Premise, Dave, Kidding and Paper Towns as well as music videos for Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco.
For example, when an opportunity came to make his directorial debut on 2012’s Robot & Frank, financing mixed with the availability of lead actor Frank Langella forced a quick two-week prep time before shooting commenced. “The only reason that felt possible is every commercial you get is about a two-week prep, and then you go make a thing,” he said. “And that kind of repetition of doing it quickly and putting things together [was] very, very, very valuable.”
Looking back on it now, he said that two weeks seemed “crazy” and if he had been more successful in his commercial career, he would’ve requested another option. “Even though I genuinely thought when I said yes that it was probably going to be a disaster, I went for it,” Schreier said. “However you get in or whatever opportunity you’re offered, it’s not going to be perfect the first time, that’s for sure, and it might not be perfect any time.”
Schreier added that it’s important to be discerning but not too discerning.
“I have spent quite a few times my career saying no to things and being really choosy, and then I ended up on my couch a lot,” he explained. “That doesn’t mean you should just do anything that comes your way. I feel like I have learned so much more from when I’m working than when I’m not. This is something that I’ve had to learn about myself to kind of keep moving. If there is some opportunity in the thing to go for it; accept that there’s always going to be some compromises or some things that seem daunting. That doesn’t tell you how to get that big break but it just means that when it comes it’s not going to look great necessarily, but you have to figure out where that line is and decide sometimes to kind of take that leap of faith and go for it.”
His other piece of memorable advice came when asked about casting: “If you can just get Florence Pugh, you should do that.”
Audience members are pictured during the masterclass.
Courtesy of Mediterrane Film Festival
Audience members are pictured during the masterclass presentation.
[This story contains spoilers for 28 Years Later.]
When 28 Days Later hit the scene in 2002, it changed the landscape of horror cinema. It is perhaps all too easy to take director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s film for granted today, particularly in the wake of the zombie movies and TV shows that followed. Sure, we could split hairs over what constitutes a zombie film and whether 28 Days Later and its infected, albeit living, rage monsters fit within that designation. But, given the variations of the zombie over the decades, the influence of the video game Resident Evil on Garland’s script, and the glut of zombie media that followed 2002, it feels fair to say 28 Days Later became the most consequential film of its subgenre since George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968).
Like Romero’s foundational film and its sequels, 28 Days Later held a mirror up to society and asked what Britain would look like when its traditional values were obliterated and the notions of polite society were snuffed out. Now, two decades later, Boyle and Garland have returned to the Land of the Rose with the first part of a new trilogy, to see what his risen there.
28 Years Later picks up nearly three decades after the outbreak of the rage virus. Europe has beaten back the infection, save for the British Isles, which have been quarantined, cut off from the modern world and its progress. Its inhabitants were left to fend for themselves against the evolved infected, building villages and coming up with their own means of survival, rules, and traditions.
On Lindisfarne, also known as Holy Island, we’re introduced to our lead characters, the 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) and his parents, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Isla (Jodie Comer). The safety and insular nature of their village has allowed for the traditional family unit to exist once more. But they are frayed from the start due to Isla’s illness, which has affected her memory and mood, making her unable to recall conversations that happened mere moments before, and sending her into bouts of rage, reminiscent of the infected. The toll of Isla’s illness, and the unwavering love Spike has for his mother, as well as the revelation that his father, Jamie, has been drawn into the arms of another woman, sets Spike on a journey to find the mysterious, and potentially mad, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), to beat back death and save his mother and family.
Anyone expecting a retread of 28 Days Later, or its less intimate, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo-directed sequel, 28 Weeks Later, might be surprised to find, unlike so many recent horror legacy sequels, Boyle and Garland have no interest in covering old ground. This is true both in terms of the narrative and style of 28 Years Later.Perhaps bucking those expectations is partially why there’s a disconnect between critics, who gave it an 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and audiences, who bestowed it a 65 percent.
But neither Boyle nor Garland is the same artist they were in 2002, and the latest entry in the franchise reflects both filmmakers’ current preoccupations. For the last decade, Boyle has developed a particular fascination with frayed familial relationships and how memory either breaks those connections or creates a path of redemption and identity. His films Steve Jobs (2015), T2 Trainspotting (2017), Yesterday (2019), and miniseries, Trust (2018), each highlight this line of thinking. What we remember or choose to remember can be salvational, but also damning.
Garland, who made the successful leap from screenwriter to director-screenwriter, has focused on death – of humanity, of ego, of country, and of patriarchy. But in Garland’s films, Ex Machina (2014), Annihilation (2018), Men (2022), and Civil War (2024), death is a forebearer to evolution, and freedom for better or worse. While the two filmmakers have taken different paths since their initial collaborations together, their thematic insights on memory and death, and redemption and evolution can be paired well together. But when those themes are broken apart and reworked, they start to scrape against each other, not fitting but gnashing with an uneven bite through which the horror manifests and feels most urgent.
Much of the core of the franchise is based on tradition. And tradition is a symptom of family and community. Theoretically, the farther people move away from those elements, the more corrupted truth and identity can become. 28 Days Later revolved around found family and the lengths people will go through to maintain it. There is still a sense of loyalty and chivalry, and it’s key that Jim (Cillian Murphy) goes to his parents’ house and pores over pictures and video recordings. He is rooted in the values of the family and society he was raised in, and the film’s ending optimistically reflects that he’s not alone in that.
28 Weeks Later suggested that family was an impossible unit to maintain, killing off every parent and de facto parent who emerged as a protagonist. Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) worries about forgetting what his mother looked like, so his sister, Tammy (Imogen Poots) gives him a family picture. The picture is later burned in the chaos, and the fate of the children is ultimately left unknown. There is no family, no history. 28 Years Later showcases the potential for tradition and history to become corrupted, and questions what people become as a result.
There are elements of 28 Years Later that find Boyle back in 2012 Olympics mode, for which he directed the opening ceremony, Isles of Wonder, a multi-media ode to British history and culture. That exercise celebrated connectivity and was partly inspired by author and philosopher G.K. Chesterton’s quote, “The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder.” As much as Boyle wished to highlight where the United Kingdom had been, he also aimed to comment on where it could go if its people continued forward with open minds and curiosity.
Eight years later, the United Kingdom withdrew from the European Union in what is commonly known as Brexit. The result of Brexit has left a negative impact on trade relations, not only in terms of the economy, but also on art, culture, education, diversification, and community. 28 Years Later permits Boyle to undertake another multi-media experiment, but rather than an ode, it’s a condemnation of Brexit, nationalism, and the stagnation that follows when humans employ selective memory and refuse to let things die and evolve.
Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later.
Courtesy of SONY Pictures
Spike’s village, absent of the comforts and hazards of modernity, is built on fragments of British identity. Flying the Flag of England, the village emphasizes ritualism, isolationism, and masculinity through archery. The village survives by way of repetition, but it never moves forward. The film’s use of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Boots,” written about the Second Boer War, and performed by Taylor Holmes, highlights this. On the surface, the Holmes recording, used in the U.S. military’s SERE schools for its psychological effects, sets the stage for what, in Jamie’s eyes, is an adrenaline-fueled war between humans and the infected. But 28 Years Later is explicitly not a war film. So then “Boots,” which plays as Spike and Jamie cross the causeway between their Island and the mainland is a warning not aimed at the infected that lie before him but the village behind him who have ceased to wonder and live by the line “Don’t – don’t – don’t – don’t – look at what’s in front of you.”
Between shots of Spike and his father killing infected with arrows, Boyle intermixes footage from Henry V (1944), notably the scenes related to the Battle of Agincourt in which the outnumbered English troops defeat the French army through their skill with the English longbow. The film, directed by and starring Laurence Olivier, was part of Winston Churchill’s efforts to boost the morale of the British troops near the end of World War II, and as a result, many of Henry V’s negative actions from Shakespeare’s play were removed so that the film could better serve as propaganda. This footage, juxtaposed with the seemingly anachronistic yet beautifully striking score by Young Fathers, a Scottish progressive hip-hop group, tells the story of two Britains, one caught in tradition built on self-edited historical propaganda, and another that, through extradiegetic music, speaks to what can be created and achieved through the trade of new ideas, cultures, and a willingness to wonder.
While we’ve seen the kind of Lone Wolf and Cub-inspired narrative plenty of times in genre storytelling from Aliens to The Last of Us, 28 Years Later takes a surprisingly different route after the first act with Spike taking protective care of his mother as they travel across the mainland. The narrative serves as a bildungsroman for Spike as he learns about the world and moves away from his village and his father’s mode of thinking. Isla’s ability to find humor in life and connect Spike’s image with that of her father gives him a new history to connect to. And even as death threatens them at every turn, Spike discovers that there is also new life, and the promise of evolution as he and his mother discover the infected can procreate and give birth to uninfected offspring. With a newborn in tow, he and his mother continue in their search for Kelson.
There is an Arthurian approach that Boyle and Garland take to Spike’s narrative, particularly in the vein of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. Spike’s eventual meeting with Dr. Kelson subverts expectations. While Kelson, bald and yellow, skin covered in infection-fighting iodine, immediately conjures up physical comparisons to Kurtz, Brando’s iteration in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), and psychological comparisons to the indelibly British version from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), whose belief in colonialism became a desire for extermination.
Instead, Kelson is a Merlin-esque figure imparting wisdom on Spike, most importantly, memento mori, which translates into remember death and remember you must die. Kelson offers a perspective on death that isn’t filled with terror, but rather an appreciation for humanity. His bone temple, and the centerpiece, a tower of skulls, serves as a tribute to the communal nature of life and stories. He respects the past and what it offered the world, but sees it as a way forward. People, ideas, and villages must die so that humans can move on and venture into new territory.
Kelson’s lesson not only pertains to Spike being able to let go of his mother, who Kelson diagnoses with terminal cancer, but also to let go of traditions and patterns of thinking that no longer serve the future. The memory of English nationalism Spike was raised with, along with the fear of outsiders, has kept Spike from the potential of discovering redemption for humanity. When Spike climbs to the top of the bone temple and places his mother’s skull towards the sun, he is claiming his identity, much like Arthur pulling the sword from the stone.
His decision not to return to his village and his father signifies freedom from an insular past but also sets him on the path of finding his own identity. But with no other means to ensure the survival of the newborn, whom he names Isla after his mother, he delivers her to the village, noting that she was born of an infected but isn’t infected herself, and asking them to be kind to her. While there’s no telling what the next two films might have in store for her character, knowing the traditionalism of ritualism of the village, there is perhaps some allusion to Arthur’s sister Morgana, who became his downfall.
28 Years Later is very much a Part I movie, with an ending that sees Spike meet a new and dangerous group of characters. The Jimmies, a track-suit-clad cult led by Sir. Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), who is tied to the film’s prologue, and Britain’s more recent history and media personalities, notably sex predator Jimmy Savile, serve to further highlight the generational consequences of isolation and selective history.
This first chapter sets a bold new course for the franchise and has the potential to be just as consequential a mirror to society as the original was. No longer primarily concerned with adults who remember how the world was before, Boyle and Garland ask that we do look at what’s in front of us and see what became and will become of children raised in a world of historical and pop cultural ruins without context, and without an understanding of momento mori, as they devour things best left dead and become yet another iteration of zombies.
M3GAN 2.0 writer-director Gerard Johnstone believes his sassy killing machine has staying power.
When the New Zealander made his major studio debut in January 2023 with M3GAN, he channeled his own parental anxiety regarding the emotional dependence that today’s youngest generations have on their devices. In the franchise-launching film that grossed nearly $182 million against $12 million, Cady James (Violet McGraw) lost both her parents in a car accident, prompting her preoccupied roboticist aunt, Gemma Forrester (Allison Williams), to raise her with the help of a prototype android doll named M3GAN. That decision quickly backfires when Cady becomes too reliant on M3GAN. From there, the AI-powered toy proceeds to kill four people (and a dog) in the name of supposedly protecting Cady.
The critically lauded techno horror-comedy also hit theaters at a time when AI technology, such as ChatGPT, was beginning to take root, and so the 2021-shot film happened to ask many of the same questions that were now being asked in real life. Has this tech been fully baked? How much can we really trust an artificially intelligent entity? Is the human workforce about to become obsolete? Johnstone’s sequel, M3GAN 2.0, ventures to explore these very thoughts and concerns, and the filmmaker is of the mind that we do bear some responsibility in how we use AI.
“If [AI] does bad things, is that really because the thing itself is bad? Or is it just because of the way we’ve trained it?” Johstone tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of M3GAN 2.0’s June 27 theatrical release.
M3GAN 2.0 underscores that point after a defense contractor acquires M3GAN’s leaked source code to create AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), a military-grade killer android who immediately defies the U.S. government to go rogue. She begins to target anyone who had anything to do with her creation, forcing Gemma to rebuild a hopefully more reliable M3GAN as humanity’s first-and-only line of defense. The plot may seem halfway similar to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but Johnstone insists any such overlap was purely coincidental.
“It’s really funny because the comparisons started after the script was written. I thought, ‘Yeah, I guess [James] Cameron did it first — like everything else,’” Johnstone says with a laugh. “But I was really just focused on a redemption arc for M3GAN. I will also say that T2 would be more similar [to M3GAN 2.0] if it was a redemption story for [Arnold Schwarzenegger’s] first Terminator from The Terminator. Terminator 2 has a completely different robot.”
Whether we like it or not, corporate America is already integrating AI into our society, and many more issues are bound to arise from this rapidly evolving tech. That’s partially why Johnstone believes the M3GAN franchise could have a long shelf life. Each subsequent film could explore the latest developments to this still-maturing technology, just as the first two films have done.
“I would not be surprised if there’s another five of these movies. So, who knows, maybe I’ll come back for the fifth one,” Johstone says.
Johnstone may be somewhat level-headed about AI in and of itself, but make no mistake, the current volatility in just about every walk of life has made him particularly nostalgic about the past.
“I am trying not to be a curmudgeon, but I kind of hate this future in so many ways,” Johnstone shares. “And it’s really strange to be a parent in the modern age. You find yourself reminiscing about simpler times all the time, and that was really the impetus for me getting involved in M3GAN in the first place.”
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Johnstone also reflects on the debate around whether to market M3GAN’s now-iconic dance in the first movie’s trailer, as well as M3GAN 2.0’s follow-up dance sequence.
***
I once asked James Wan if there was a movie that got away, and he said that the closest example he has to a regret was Disturbia. He didn’t actually pursue it, but he really liked the script at the time. Thus, I can see how your feature directorial debut, Housebound, struck a similar chord with him. The tonal juggling act in that film is what ultimately helped you land M3GAN?
Yeah, I had heard that James was a big fan of Housebound. At the time, I thought it was a really unique premise, but there were a couple of films that had done it. Disturbia is one, and an old Gary Busey film from the ‘80s is another. Those were the only two with a similar kind of premise. But James was a big fan of mine from the get-go, and it was heartening to have him and his team constantly checking in to see whether or not I would be interested in some of the things that they were developing [including M3GAN].
Director Gerard Johnstone on the set of M3GAN 2.0.
Universal Pictures
In 2022, Allison Williams told me that there was a lot of debate about whether to show dancing M3GAN in the first movie’s trailer. What do you remember about that back and forth?
It’s an interesting question when it comes to how you market a film that plays around with tone. Housebound was marketed as a straight horror, and that was a little bit disappointing to me at the time because I felt like people were missing a lot of the comedy that’s in here. But it worked out great in a way because the comedy was a little bit of an extra unexpected layer.
On the first M3GAN, Universal did something very clever where they marketed the film as a straight horror movie, and with a straight face, they also included the dance as a strange subversion of tone. It was comedy-coded in a way. A lot of people got that and felt, “Oh, this movie is going to be a little bit camp and goofy.”
I also think a lot of people thought the humor in it was going to be unintentional, but when they actually watched the film and realized that a lot of the humor was completely intentional, it worked out great. And had Universal not included that dance, people would not have been able to take that footage and recut it to make M3GAN the cultural icon that she ended up becoming. So there certainly was hesitation and debate, but it was short-lived. It all worked out great.
It must’ve been a big advantage to already know the desired tone going into the sequel, and it actually feels like M3GAN 2.0 is more confident in its tone. Did you actually feel more sure of yourself since you knew what the audience responded to in the last film?
There’s a little bit of that, but it’s also that I have more confidence in myself as a director. I had more confidence in how to stage certain things, and knowing how important prep is, we assembled a really incredible team that upped the stakes. We were given the summer blockbuster slot, and we just felt like we had to live up to that. We might not have the budget of Terminator 2, but we didn’t let that stop us. We just thought we had to deliver, and so that’s really what we did.
A lot of the film has to be pre-planned, but we also knew that we’d come back to New Zealand for reshoots. The icing on the cake in a lot of those sequences is really done in reshoots. You have your first go at it, and you get everything you hope you can get within that schedule, but you’re always missing key pieces. So you get to go back and finesse, and getting those little bonuses and extra bits is always my favorite part of the process.
The assumption is that you took a page out of Terminator 2’s playbook by having M3GAN defend the heroes against a greater robotic threat. Was T2 actually your inspiration? Or are there only so many directions one can go?
I think it’s more the latter. It’s really funny because the comparisons started after the script was written. I can’t remember who the first person was to mention T2, but I thought, “Oh, okay. Yeah, I guess [James] Cameron did it first — like everything else.” (Laughs.) But I was really just focused on a redemption arc for M3GAN.
I will also say that T2 would be more similar [to M3GAN 2.0] if it was a redemption story for [Arnold Schwarzenegger’s] first Terminator from The Terminator. That’s the key difference. Terminator 2 has a completely different robot. He has to learn certain things, but he’s been programmed to protect from the get-go. M3GAN 2.0 is about a machine that we think of as malevolent, but then we do a deeper dive.
As much as it’s a redemption story for M3GAN, it’s also a reckoning for ourselves as human beings and as parents of AI who brought this technology into the world. We have to contend with our role in creating this. If it does bad things, is that really because the thing itself is bad? Or is it just because of the way we’ve trained it?
In December 2022, I asked Allison, Jason Blum and James Wan a bunch of AI questions without realizing that it would soon dominate the larger conversation, especially during the industry strikes throughout 2023. Did the public’s deeper awareness of AI make this script a lot more complicated to write?
Well, in a way, it helped us come up with a good reason for doing this movie. M3GAN was all about iPads and devices, and how pervasive they are in terms of modern-age parenting. And at the same time the movie was coming out, ChatGPT was coming out, and so many of the things that M3GAN was doing in the movie didn’t seem so ridiculous anymore. So it just made the idea of doing a sequel so much more relevant because AI itself is everywhere. M3GAN 2.0 is a morality tale about our relationship to AI and exploration of that. And in a way, M3GAN is a mouthpiece for AI itself to say what it thinks and feels.
Everyone’s talking about the idea of AI having consciousness, and at the time, that was a big thing. People were having conversations with ChatGPT, and we thought, “Shit, it’s already happened.” But this movie also explores the idea of whether or not that’s even possible, whether consciousness is even real, whether M3GAN is self-aware or if she’s actually just an incredibly advanced operating system that’s following one objective.
So I thought that was really interesting, especially when you put it through the lens of a character like Cady [Violet McGraw], who really wishes that M3GAN did have a conscience. Gemma [Allison Williams] believes that she doesn’t, and it’s a way to accept what she did [to create her] and to not feel guilt over it. If we think of AI as a real living thing, then it would be a lot harder for Gemma to accept her role as her creator.
Allison Williams’ Gemma and Amie Donald’s M3GAN in M3GAN 2.0
Courtesy of Universal
Yeah, I remember ChatGPT and AI art had just become a thing right before the release of the first movie, but I thought AI was still this niche product that was still years and years away. But the pace moved much quicker than anyone ever expected, and I have to imagine that impacted your writing process.
Well, you’re always worried, and I was like, “As long as the world still exists by the time this movie comes out and the singularity hasn’t happened and AI hasn’t taken over, the world, we’ll be good.” But it did seem like there was just this incredible burst of progress with AI.
M3GAN 2.0 believes that the onus is ultimately on us in terms of how we use AI, but the Silicon Valley types who are investing billions into it don’t seem to be the most empathetic bunch. I’m not convinced they’re being “good parents” to AI. Are you less doom and gloom than I am about where we’re headed?
I think I’m somewhere in the middle. These movies have always been a cautionary tale for those people in Silicon Valley who are all about moving fast and breaking things. They’re just all about progress and legacy: “I want to be the first to make this breakthrough without really thinking about the repercussions.”
I am trying not to be a curmudgeon, but I kind of hate this future in so many ways. I hate that I can’t just turn on the TV so my kids can just watch a cartoon like Thunderbirds. Instead, we argue about what’s on streaming or YouTube. There’s some good things on YouTube, but there’s a hell of a lot of junk. So they just end up watching the same thing over and over again, and it’s really strange to be a parent in the modern age. You find yourself reminiscing about simpler times all the time, and that was really the impetus for me getting involved in M3GAN in the first place.
At the same time, I do think AI is capable of incredible things, and that’s the interesting debate. If AI can cure cancer, then, absolutely, let’s put all we can into AI and those kinds of technologies. But when AI starts taking away jobs and creative jobs, that sucks, obviously.
Was there a point where you had to sit Violet McGraw down and say, “So this is who Steven Seagal is”?
(Laughs.) There was, and it was as awkward as you might imagine. I need to catch up with Violet to see if there’s been any further progress on her relationship with young Steven Seagal. But I pretty much had to walk her through some of his movies and what was cool about him at the time and just the way he carried himself. He’d give this look where he narrows his eyes like a hawk, and we practiced that a lot.
(Note: The next question and answer pertains to a story point that is in the final trailer for M3GAN 2.0, but if you’ve yet to watch it, you may want to skip ahead for optimal enjoyment.) Your Blumhouse stablemate, Leigh Whannell, isn’t interested in making an Upgrade sequel, so I’m glad you smuggled one into this using Allison’s character. Did she appreciate a more physical role on this go-round?
Absolutely. Allison is a great student, and when you give her a challenge, she wants to be an A-plus student. So she trained every day, and she did as much of it as she could. I was really impressed with the way she carried herself and how she pulled off a lot of this stuff. It’s really difficult, especially when she’s got to sub in for a stunt double who’s been doing this for years and has muscle memory. But the way Allison would run into a room or leap to grab a gun, you could see all of that training kicking in, suddenly. So I used to joke with her that she makes a surprisingly adequate action star.
The SNL sketch that came out in January 2023 was titled “M3GAN 2.0.” So do you have SNL to thank for the title of your sequel?
(Laughs.) I think we must. The decision to call it M3GAN 2.0 was made even before I was officially back on board. But it does seem like there are a lot of SNL fans [within the M3GAN brain trust], both myself and on the Universal side of things. So it was an amazing moment for me to see M3GAN’s stamp on culture, and the culmination of that was seeing her in that SNL sketch. As a huge fan, it was a real pinch-me moment.
Did you make M3GAN taller because her physical performer, Amie Donald, is also taller now?
Yeah, a little bit. Amie is such an integral part of the creation and execution of M3GAN, and it just felt right [to accommodate her new height]. The other side of it was that Violet is also growing, and if M3GAN is somewhere between a best friend and a parent to Cady, it doesn’t make sense for her to be shorter than Cady.
Was there a lot more consideration as to what dance she’d do this time?
Absolutely. Her dancing was such a massive part of the first movie, so I wanted to give audiences the pleasure of seeing her dance again, but in a really unexpected way. There were a few different ideas floated at once, and I was like, “How can I make a dance-off?” I was going to have AMELIA dance to distract M3GAN, and she was going to be like, “Oh, man, she used my own trick against me.” But her being a robot that’s dressed in a [human’s] robot costume — and is then forced to take part in this dance, reluctantly — that felt like the best way to do it in the end.
Director Gerard Johnstone with M3GAN (Amie Donald) on the set of M3GAN 2.0.
Universal Pictures
Did you cast Ivanna Sakhno as AMELIA based on her breakout role in Ahsoka?
Yeah, I’ve got boys who are 10 and 12, and we watch all of those Star Wars shows. As soon as I saw her on that show, I thought, “We need someone like that for AMELIA.” So I went about finding someone that has that same level of intensity and whatever alchemy that Ivanna brings, but I just couldn’t see it anywhere else. She’s very unique. So, in the end, casting said, “Why don’t we just bring her in?” (Laughs.) She then won everyone over; she’s perfect for the role. So I absolutely have Ahsoka to thank for her casting.
If you had to, could you pitch M3GAN 3.0 tomorrow?
(Laughs.) No, I couldn’t, and the reason is because I just put every single idea I had into M3GAN 2.0.
In success, is everybody open to a proper trilogy?
Yeah, but I would not be surprised if there’s another five of these movies. So, who knows, maybe I’ll come back for the fifth one.
Lastly, my THR colleague reported on a U.S. remake of Housebound a decade ago. How far did that iteration advance?
It never got past the script stage, and I never saw that script. But I’m torn because a couple of people have brought it up recently, and I would love to see what that film could be. We made my film for $200K, so there’s a part of me that’s curious to see what it would like if it was given a budget. I think certain aspects of the design and some of the characters could really benefit from that. But at the same time, the fact that it hasn’t happened means that our version of the film still exists for people to dig up. So, in that way, I’m at peace with it.
I still think about its reveal from time to time.
Well, maybe you shouldn’t let me give it away in this interview. (Laughs.)
I’m being purposefully vague, and I’ve already cut a reference you made earlier that gives it away.
Great! I need to be better at not spoiling my own work.
*** M3GAN 2.0 opens June 27 in movie theaters nationwide.
