‘M3GAN’ spinoff ‘SOULM8TE’ will be like ‘Fatal Attraction’ with robots (exclusive)

If the M3GAN cinematic universe continues to grow, would we call it the MCU? More importantly, would it give Marvel Studios a run for its money?

“Listen, fingers crossed,” James Wan, a producer on all these movies through his company Atomic Monster, tells Entertainment Weekly. “Let’s hope the second one does well enough that we can get more M3GANs.”

While M3GAN 2.0, the sequel to the instant pop culture femininomenon of 2022, opens in theaters this weekend, Wan and star Allison Williams provide an update on the next stage of evolution: SOULM8TE, a spinoff movie that functions as an R-rated erotic thriller.

“Here’s how I would describe it: Everyone has already pictured it,” Williams, who stars in the M3GAN movies as Gemma and serves as an executive producer on SOULM8TE, tells EW separately. “When the first movie came out, we knew everyone was going to be imagining this, so we were like, ‘Don’t do that to our girl.’ We will give you a different person and a different story and an R-rated world to do this in. Let M3GAN be M3GAN, and leave her out of this completely.”

Wan confirms the film, which was already shot in New Zealand, is now in postproduction. “M3GAN, obviously, dabbles in the PG-13 world, the younger demographic. We always felt like there might be a more adult story to tell, and that’s really what SOULM8TE is,” he explains. “SOULM8TE is basically set in the same AI world but seen through a more grown-up perspective, one that embraces all the great erotic thrillers from the ’90s. It’s like Fatal Attraction but with robots.”

Kate Dolan (You Are Not My Mother) directs SOULM8TE, which is slated to release in theaters on Jan. 2, 2026. David Rysdahl (No Exit) plays a man who acquires an artificially intelligent android (Evil Dead Rise star Lily Sullivan) to cope with the loss of his recently deceased wife. He attempts to create a truly sentient partner but inadvertently turns a supposedly harmless love-bot into a deadly soulmate.

The film is based on a story by Wan, Ingrid Bisu, and Rafael Jordan; Dolan rewrote an original draft of the screenplay by Jordan.

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“It’s already happening in parts of the world. These exist,” Williams adds of companion-type sex-bots. “So it felt irresistible to then say, if a M3GAN existed in our world, someone would take that tech and put it in the form of a female-bodied person whose sole purpose on the planet is to pleasure a person. We extrapolate from there.”

Wan says SOULM8TE still has “that darkest sense of humor” from the main M3GAN movies, “but it’s really more grown-up. It is hard to replicate that sassiness that M3GAN has, and we don’t really want to do the same thing that we’ve done because M3GAN has fully stuck a claim to that style of humor, if you will.”

Has Wan already begun to think about a team-up of characters like M3GAN, the SOULM8TE bot, and AMELIA (the new killer robot played by Ivanna Sakhno in M3GAN 2.0)? “The Avengers of the M3GAN universe?” Wan responds. “I haven’t really thought about that, I got to be honest. We have joked about it, but we are not quite sure whether in that version, are they the villains or are they the good guys? We haven’t crossed that path.”

In the meantime, get your fix of the sassy M3GAN in M3GAN 2.0, in theaters Friday, June 27.