Long Range Forecast: M3GAN 2.0 Opts For an Ambitious Summer Release Date

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Long Range Forecast — June 27, 2025

M3GAN 2.0 | Universal/Blumhouse

Domestic Opening Weekend Range: $20M – $30M

With M3GAN 2.0, Universal and Blumhouse have moved their burgeoning robo-horror franchise (a spinoff, Soulm8te, is in the works) to a significantly more competitive release date than the early January window occupied by the first film, which was a significant hit in 2022 with a $30.4M debut and a $95.1M domestic total. Strong holdovers for the first M3GAN—which didn’t have a week-to-week dip of more than 50 percent until its eighth weekend in theaters—speak to a positive word-of-mouth that could augur well for interest in the sequel, which hails from the same director (Gerard Johnstone), writers (Akela Cooper and James Wan, with Johnstone adding a co-writer credit for 2.0), and key cast (Allison Williams and Violet McGraw, with Amie Donald and Jenna Davis as the body and voice of the titular robot, respectively) as the first film.

Unless M3GAN 2.0 opens severely lower than expectations, it will secure the highest debut for Universal/Blumhouse so far this year; previous 2024 releases are January’s Wolf Man ($10.8M domestic opening, $20.7M domestic total), March’s The Woman in the Yard ($9.3M domestic opening, $22.4M domestic total), and April’s Drop ($7.3M domestic opening, $16.6M domestic total). Earlier Blumhouse releases that opened somewhere in the $20M – $30M range our panel predicts for M3GAN 2.0 include:

• The Black Phone (2022): $23.6M domestic opening, $90.1M domestic total
• The Exorcist: Believer (2023): $26.4M domestic opening, $65.5M domestic total
• The Invisible Man (2020): $28.2M domestic opening, $64.9M domestic total

Looking outside the Universal/Blumhouse sphere, a point of comparison for M3GAN/M3GAN 2.0 is Paramount’s Smile and Smile 2. Like M3GAN, Smile became a word-of-mouth horror hit after debuting theatrically during a relatively quiet period at the box office—for Smile, the last weekend of September 2022—and maintaining better-than-50 percent holds for its first two months, earning itself a sequel significantly larger in scale. For the Smile films, while debut grosses were roughly flat—$22.6M for the first, $23M for the second—Smile 2 ultimately came in significantly below its predecessor, dropping -58.6 percent in its second weekend and ultimately earning $69M domestically to Smile‘s $109.5M.

A debut on the high end of our $20M – $30M predicted range for M3GAN 2.0 would repeat the Smile pattern, at least in the sense that M3GAN and M3GAN 2.0 would have very similar box office debuts. One key difference between the two sequels: Smile 2, like the first Smile, debuted in autumn. For M3GAN 2.0, Universal has taken the risk of swapping out M3GAN‘s January release date with a debut in late June, where it will face competition from both fellow horror releases (28 Years Later comes out the weekend before M3GAN 2.0, I Know What You Did Last Summer three weekends after) and the blockbusters opening throughout July, including Jurassic World Rebirth (7/2), Superman (7/11), and The Fantastic Four: First Steps (7/25).

M3GAN 2.0 is only the fourth film Blumhouse has released in June on over 1,000 theaters, following:

• Upgrade (2018, released under the BH Tilt label): $4.6M domestic opening, $11.9M domestic total
• Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015): $22.6M domestic opening, $52.2M domestic total
• The Purge (2013): $34M domestic opening, $64.4M domestic total

So far this summer, one franchise entry to come out in a significantly more crowded release corridor than (most of) its predecessor(s) is Lionsgate’s From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, which debuted under expectations with $24.5M. In doing so, it became the lowest opener of the series since the first John Wick, the only other film in the series to not come out in Q1.

Tracking Updates [as of June 13]