M3GAN is GOOD. Is BLUMHOUSE?

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 On paper, this should not have worked. "M3GAN" is probably a bad idea for a movie: a purposely campy take on the killer doll subgenre, edited down from an R rating to a PG-13 in post production to sell tickets to Tiktok teens. But the movie is good. I thought so, critics think so (the 94% rotten tomatoes score is positively absurd for a horror-comedy), and the audience at large agrees (the $168 mil worldwide box office haul is producer Jason Blum's biggest since the pandemic). The movie is actually funny, because it knows exactly when and how to ramp up the absurdity, and because Allison Williams plays a better woefully stupid tech genius than any of the other movies this decade about dumb tech geniuses. It even has something kind of like a sincere message, about actually parenting your kids instead of outsourcing that role to technology. As a slasher flick, it never feels inhibited by its PG-13 rating. (The MPAA censoring is only obvious when the movie makes weird cuts around Ronny Chieng presumably saying "fuck" a few times.) In short, "M3GAN" is really quite good. 

 I think Jason Blum, leader of the Blumhouse production studio, has to think about how much he wants to learn from its success. There's the direct consequence of a franchise. Nearly every successful Blumhouse film has led to sequels, and more often than not those sequels mark diminishing returns both creatively and financially. "Split" was a delightful comeback for M Night Shyamalan. "Glass" is a more indulgent follow up, and much duller for it. David Gordon Green's "Halloween" trilogy saw worse reviews and less money for each installment. "Happy Death Day", probably the entry in the Blumhouse catalogue most similar to "M3GAN", looked to be a lame gimmick slasher but turned out to be a killer slasher comedy, and people liked it and it made money. The sequel went in a very different direction, with more sci-fi DNA than horror, and made about half of the original's revenue. The "M3GAN" characters are fun and the ending clearly sets up a potential sequel, but if there's a lesson to be learned from history, it's that people should keep their expectations low. In a broader sense I wonder if Blum will start going more comedic or skewing younger with his productions. Frankly, he's been on a bit of a cold streak with his more serious aimed-at-adults fare. The last really good one of those, I think, was Leigh Whannell's "Invisible Man". The teen slashers are good fun. I enjoyed "Freaky" and especially "Ma" an awful lot. But it would be a shame to see Blumhouse lean into only the most bankable of horror subgenres. They're making a variety of good films, as different as "Vengeance" and "Sick" and "Nanny" (which yes, they acquired at Sundance and did not produce, but functionally that's the same thing they did on "Unfriended"). None of those got wide releases though. To borrow a Jeffrey Kaztenberg metaphor, Jason Blum is as good of a singles and doubles hitter as the horror industry has right now. I'm a bit concerned that he's too satisfied with that to take a swing as big as "Barbarian". 

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