"M3GAN": 19 Cool Facts About Making The Murderous Marionette Movie
With her viral dance sweeping TikTok, it's easy to forget she's not actually a real life social media star. But just how did the team behind M3GAN make her seem so real?
1.James Wan and Atomic Monster pitched the idea to Jason Blum.
Blumhouse Productions CEO Jason Blum was approached by director/producer James Wan with the initial idea for M3GAN.
Originally pitched to him as "A.I. gone wrong," Blum told Variety that he felt lucky to have been approached, and from there, they began a long period of preparation for what the killer doll would look like and how she'd work.
Blum said: "The way you stick the landing is you don’t start prepping your movie until you know exactly every detail of what M3GAN is going to look like, how you’re going to shoot her."
"We’ve made mistakes in the past where we have some kind of monster in a movie and we start prepping before the monster is worked out. We learned from those mistakes, so I didn’t want to spend any money on the movie until we knew exactly how we were going to do M3GAN. Special effects go wrong when they are rushed."
2.As you may expect, Chucky had an influence on M3GAN.
You can't mention a demonic doll and not think of Chucky.
Synonymous with the killer-doll genre, Chucky was the star of the 1988 movie Child's Play, and gave many people a doll phobia. Family therapist Michelle C. Brooten-Brooks says that a phobia can commonly be caused by something that scared you as a child, so watching Child's Play as a kid can trigger a doll phobia — much like how a ton of adults are scared of clowns due to watching Stephen King's IT when they were young.
And fears like this, which are often irrational, can be picked up via "vicarious learning through others" — aka parents or guardians still in the clutches of childhood doll phobias!
As the fear gets passed down generation to generation, we've seen killer dolls crop up year after year to keep the cycle going. From The Boy to Annabelle, all these movies tap into that underlying sense of creepiness many of us pick up from dolls.
M3GAN screenwriter Akela Cooper said: "My thing was ventriloquist dummies. I saw the Anthony Hopkins movie Magic at a really young age, and that cemented the creepiness in my brain. I was a big Child’s Play fan, too. It was always my dream to create an iconic monster of my own."
3.The team deliberately tapped into the idea of "uncanny valley" to up the creep factor as much as possible.
"Uncanny valley" was coined by a Japanese professor of robotics named Masahiro Mori, and refers to the delicate balance between reality and synthetics.
At first, we're in awe and may marvel at the craftsmanship of something super realistic, but it's not long before we become repulsed or fearful at how real something seems while our brain grapples with the idea that it's really not. We're quite simply not biologically programmed to deal with humanoid objects!
With all this in mind, M3GAN's supervising puppeteer Adrien Morot deliberately made the doll straddle the line between real and fake.
He said: "There should be that fine line of ‘uncanny valley’ where the finish, the eyes, the hair, everything should be looking almost real. It’s not over the top. It’s not cartoony. It should be unsettling."
Producer James Wan said: "I would say, for the first time, that the idea of that uncanny valley actually really helps a movie like M3GAN. It actually makes her feel creepy to be sort of in between real and not quite real.”
4.The team behind the movie wanted the doll to be as realistic as possible, so tried to rely as little as possible on CGI.
Director Gerard Johnstone said: "From the start, we wanted to do something practical that didn’t rely on CGI. That’s just more fun. And I wanted the actors to have a real thing that they can interact with."
Producer James Wan agreed, stating that both he and Johnstone wanted M3GAN’s physical appearance to be created by both CGI and an animatronic puppet, to really push that line between what's real and what's not.
Wan told Collider: “I worked with Gerard to kind of go, ‘We want her to feel as real as possible, but also at the same time, we still need to remember that she’s a doll.’ And so we don’t want to go too far [in] that direction, as well."
"The doll aspect, generally, is what makes the killer doll genre or the creepy doll genre creepy, because it’s clearly an inanimate object. It’s a plaything, it’s a doll. But the fact that this plaything could have a life of its own is what makes it scary."
Executive producer Adam Hendricks said they wanted the doll to look like a "real life version of a Polar Express character."
5.Director Gerard Johnstone was a stickler for the smallest details, ensuring every shot was signed off right down to the absolute minutiae of M3G4N's movements.
James Wan mentioned director Gerard Johnstone's dedication to ensuring M3GAN was just real enough, but Jason Blum went one further, saying: "At points, he drove everyone crazy. I look back now, and I’m grateful he did."
"The tiniest details of how her eyes would look and her stare…he was obsessed. A lot of the success of the movie is that she’s kind of human and kind of a robot."
"One of the hardest things was figuring out what M3GAN would look like and how she’d work. I give Gerard a lot of credit for figuring that out."
6.M3GAN is played by two actors.
M3GAN came to life through a mixture of CGI, puppetry and real actors. Amie Donald performed the movements for M3GAN's body while wearing an animatronic mask, while Jenna Davis voiced the deadly doll.
Donald, 12, has performed movie stunts before and is also a professional dancer — in fact, she represented New Zealand at the Dance World Cup in 2019, at just 9 years old. She won silver and bronze, becoming the first performer from New Zealand to win a medal at the competition.
Donald said: "Dancing very much helps because you need balance as a robot. Robots, you don’t see them wobbling around or doing human stuff, so control and waiting around are two things that are very important that come from dance that I can use in acting.”
Meanwhile, the sinister-sweet voice of M3GAN is courtesy of actor Jenna Davis, who has starred in several Disney shows, as well as Hulu's Maggie and Netflix's Treehouse Detectives.
She said that if she had her own M3GAN, she would probably have her help clean her room, help with homework, and do "the practical things we all have struggles with.”
7.That desire to straddle the line between human and doll meant they needed an actor the size of a doll.
After being forced to relocate from Montreal to New Zealand due to COVID, director Gerard Johnstone was worried that they wouldn't find someone who had the tiny size yet massive talent needed to bring M3GAN to life.
Luckily for Johnstone, he found native New Zealander Amie Donald "just down the road."
"She's a fun girl who's a national dance champion, just phenomenally talented," he said.
8.There were multiple puppets used for various different aspects of M3GAN's movement.
Supervising puppeteer Adrien Morot said: “It was decided early on that almost every medium shot would be done with a puppet. For every shot where she would be seen walking in full or dancing in a corridor, that would be Amie wearing a mask that, if need be, would be then animated to have lip movement or the eyes moving."
The mask wasn't any old mask either — it was built by Oscar-nominated Adrien and Kathy Tse of Montreal-based Morot FX Studios.
Adrien added: "We had six or seven different puppets that were capable of doing different things. We had some of the head moving, eyes moving, the moving torso, and there were a couple that were capable of a full computerized range of movements.”
Executive producer Adam Hendricks said there was also a puppeteer behind the animatronic who would manipulate M3GAN's neck to look around, and that if they changed the pace or a line during filming, the mask needed to be reprogrammed.
Ugh, imagine stumbling into a room of seven glassy-eyed M3GANs?! What a surreal workplace environment!
9.These puppets are more masterpiece than marionette.
It's pretty obvious from watching the movie, but these puppets were not the standard off-the-shelf variety.
Exec producer Adam Hendricks said: "Unlike a normal puppet where the eyelids are far from the surface of the eyeball, [Morot] made it just like a human being’s — the eyelid slides right against the eyeball when it opens and closes."
When it came to the highly technical mask Amie Donald wore when bringing M3GAN to life, he also explained that the realism required crew members on hand to administer fake tears to help with the remote-controlled blinking.
Hendricks said: "Between every take, they were constantly lubricating the eyes, and every now and then, her eyelid would get stuck during a take which would be frustrating. At the same time, we knew that was the trade-off for having something so lifelike," he told Los Angeles Times.
Certain shots were done with a puppet, while12-year-old Amie Donald performed various scenes as the bloodthirsty Barbie.
10.While the doll had to be as close to human as possible, the actor who provided M3GAN's body movements in some shots had to learn to move more robotically.
Working with movement coaches Jed Brophy and Luke Hawker alongside stunt coordinator Isaac Hamon, actor Amie Donald used her dance and gymnastic skills to perfect the creepy killer doll movements. Donald credits the team for helping her nail her robot routine and get into character.
She performed all her own stunts, including a cobra rise — the Matrix-esque move which sees her lift herself up from flat on the ground using only her legs, and the spine-chilling all-fours run!
11.In fact, the creepy all-fours run you see in the movie and trailer wasn't planned.
12....and nor was the now-viral dance sequence.
13.It was also not going to be put in trailers originally.
Left to Johnstone, the dance wasn't going to be in the trailers.
Keen to keep his cards close to his chest to make that cinema trip even more impactful, Johnstone said: "I was so happy to be proved wrong by Universal, who didn’t really listen to me when I said that we were giving away too much."
"At that point, we weren’t sure if the film would be anything. ‘What are people gonna think of that? Are we in our own bubble here?’ The bubble burst in a big way when that trailer dropped.”
Exec producer and actor on the movie Allison Williams said: "To our great joy, basically the second the trailer hit the internet, they just got it. The memes, the copies of the dance. People understood her in this way that I absolutely loved, and we just thought, "OK. Job done. They get her, she belongs to them now.' This is amazing."
"They are taking great care of her. They're deploying her in the most hilarious ways to make fun of people. They just got this fierce best-friend vibe from her, and it's been an utter joy. I mean, what more could you want?"
14.Due its popularity with teens on TikTok, the movie had to be tamed a little so they could see it in theaters.
With #M3GANDANCE racking up over 291.3 million views on TikTok at the time of writing, it goes without saying that the doll's disconcerting dance moves certainly resonated with a younger audience.
So, the quandary for the movie's creators was whether to stick to the gory original material, or drop the body count a little so that the film got a rating that allowed teens to see it.
Screenwriter Akela Cooper said: "No shade to Universal, love them, and I understand that once the trailer went viral, teenagers got involved, and you want them to be able to see it."
"There should be an unrated version at some point. ... I heard it is on the books. But yes, it was way gorier (originally). Her body count in the script was higher than in the movie."
Some were disappointed when it was announced that the movie would be PG-13, but producers Jason Blum and James Wan stayed loyal to their plans, with Blum saying: "Some of the scariest movies of all time are PG-13, so I don't put too much stock in the bellyaching. Go see the movie, and then tell me about it."
15.Voice actor Jenna Davis didn't see what M3GAN looked like until she was in the studio recording.
After auditioning from her closet, Davis had to sit and imagine what she thought a saccharine, sweet, yet absolutely deadly doll would sound like.
"I really had to imagine prior what I thought she would look like. I wanted to make sure she was an A.I. with personality, flare, and sass", she told KTLA.
Talking about Amie Donald's work on physically bringing M3GAN to life, Davis said: "It was definitely teamwork between the two of us."
16.It's a very self-aware movie.
Screenwriter Akela Cooper is only too aware that these days, we're not impressed by trope-filled storylines. We don't buy someone going down to the basement to investigate a weird noise alone, we scream at characters who go off on their own, and we roll our eyes when they don't double-tap the villain.
To build a more realistic horror that subverts the tropes without being too meta on screen, Cooper said: "In a post-Scream world, characters have to be smart. The audience is smart. You have to acknowledge what you’re doing. That’s why the characters in the movie are like, “This is creepy” or “We shouldn’t do this!” They know."
"It’s fun to have all of that knowledge because it gives you a road map. You know what worked in the past, you know what hasn’t worked. It’s like Mario Kart, trying to get as many coins and avoid as many bananas as possible."
17.It's Allison Williams's first rodeo as executive producer, but she hopes it's not her last.
She told Insider: "I don't think I can go back to not executive producing. I'm sure people are gonna try, but I will fight them for it because it's so nice to be as invested as you want to be in a project like this."
"I love being involved in every draft and then many, many, many months after that — years, sometimes, in this case — every cut of the film and everything in between."
18.The movie marks the first time in his nearly 30-year-long career that Jason Blum began talking about a sequel before the movie was released.
He was so sure that audiences would fall for M3GAN that it changed the way he thought about sequels and admitted his desire to make one before M3G4N had even hit the theaters.
"After I first saw the movie, we had a good sense that a sequel might really work. We broke our cardinal rule. I felt so bullish that we started entertaining a sequel earlier than we usually do," he told Variety.
Blum loves the character so much that he also rocked up at several M3GAN events dressed as the murderous marionette!
Executive producer and Gemma actor Allison Williams said: "Those of us who were part of making it are not dumb. The idea of planting a little bit of a seed that we might wanna keep going is always a good idea."
Did that have an influence on the way M3G4N's storyline went? Well, with James Wan and Jason Blum in talks to merge their horror powerhouses and Wan talking about how he likes to bear in mind the whole universe around each story he creates in case an opportunity to re-enter that world comes along, it seems likely that we can glean where the sequel may go from what unfolds in M3GAN.
19.A sequel is already confirmed.
Written by M3GAN screenwriter Akela Cooper, the second installment will be called M3GAN 2.0, and will release on January 17, 2025. James Wan and Jason Blum are ready to go, but director Gerard Johnstone isn't confirmed yet.
Allison Williams and Violet McGraw, who played Gemma and Cady respectively, are already onboard, with Williams acting as a producer after serving as exec producer on M3GAN.
What did you think of M3GAN? Let me know in the comments!
Universal Pictures / Via giphy.com