‘Megan 2.0’ trailer premieres during Super Bowl ahead of summer release
The much-awaited follow-up to Gerard Johnstone’s 2022 horror Megan was teased at last night’s Super Bowl with a special commercial appropriately set to Chappell Roan’s feminist anthem, ‘Femininomenon’.
The first movie followed Gemma, played by Allison Williams, who introduced her orphaned niece, Cady, to M3GAN, an AI doll programmed to protect and entertain her. However, once the doll’s behaviour grows increasingly violent, Gemma is faced with the new challenge of trying to control her and protect her niece.
The sequel, Megan 2.0, is set two years after the events of the first movie. Gemma has become a successful author and advocate for greater regulation of AI. However, upon realising that Megan’s technology has been stolen by a defence contractor, she makes it her mission to upgrade Megan’s AI to fight the rival doll.
Upon the first movie’s release in 2022, the doll became central to several viral trends, particularly on TikTok, which became fixated with the movie’s notorious dance scene and earned Johnstone’s narrative comparisons to Chucky from Child’s Play.
However, while there are definite similarities, the director previously told Digital Spy that the message within Megan is slightly different and instead hinges on “parenting in the 21st century”.
He said: “Obviously, we didn’t know that Child’s Play was going to get a remake when we were developing this, so that was definitely a factor. It’s like, ‘Oh, OK, shit. And he’s also got AI. OK, shit’. [However] our allegory was so much more about parenting in the 21st century, and I see M3GAN as a co-parent more than a friend.”
Johnstone also stated that they knew they had a strong theme and “something to say”, especially after just becoming a new parent and understanding the struggles that come with “relying on devices too much”. In his mind, the movie served to prompt these conversations about how much “it sucks that [children] can’t have the same upbringing” as he did.
Another underlying theme that cannot be ignored, particularly with the influx of stars discussing the difficulties and potential negative impacts, is that of AI usage in the arts.
However, while there are undoubtedly disadvantages to AI in its varied forms, Megan screenwriter Akela Cooper claimed that this is only the case in certain scenarios, saying, “AI is only a threat insofar as we make it a threat. There has to be a human hand in it.”
Megan 2 will be arriving in theatres on June 27th, 2025.
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