With Hollywood production costs spiralling out of control, major studios are making bigger risks with every release.

They could certainly take a page out of the Blumhouse playbook however. The independent production company, now in its 25th year, has had a savvy business model that has served them exceptionally well, and that’s been to produce low budget films, mostly horrors, that have seen impressive returns for them at the box office.

Their franchises have includedParanormal Activity, Insidious, Sinister and The Purge, as well as a number of well known directors helming their films, including Jordan Peele, Damien Chazelle and M. Night Shyamalan.

One of their most recent successes was 2022’s M3GAN, which made a jaw-dropping $181 million at the box office, against a paltry budget of £12 million. So this sequel was inevitable.

Since the demise of her robot creation, Gemma (Allison Williams) is now an advocate for AI regulation, warning against the power of AI. But her words are falling on deaf ears within the tech industry, as Artificial Intelligence continues to be developed in the world of tech, especially that of warfare.

Unbeknownst to Gemma, a secret branch of the Pentagon has created a new breed of android, called AMELIA, which has been built using some of M3GAN’s original code.

She is being used as a covert operative, given a mission to find a target and retrieve him from a hostile environment. But when AMELIA informs her creators that she is now in control and thinking for herself, her mission doesn’t go as they had planned.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, Gemma soon discovers that not only isn’t M3GAN dead after all, but they are going to have to work together if there’s going to be any hope of stopping this new self-thinking robot threat.

The original M3GAN was hugely entertaining, and as much as a sequel was inevitable from its success, more antics with the crazed robot would be welcome.

However, its success lead to a false sense of being untouchable from writer and director Gerard Johnstone, who took this sequel in a whole new direction, which turned out to box office death for Blumhouse and a rare flop, making less than $40 million at the box office on a budget of up to $25 million.

It’s not as if it’s unrecognisable from the original, as the quirky humour and dark tones are still intact, but you get the sense that they jumped a fair few stages; the first film was clearly a nod to the creative horrors being made in the eighties, but this one feels like it would be more like the fifth entry in the franchise, and not the second, as it was taking a wild, last-ditched swing at keeping the franchise alive.

And unusually, producer Jason Blum pretty much admitted that much after its poor reception theatrically. "We all thought Megan was like Superman,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “We could do anything to her. We could change genres. We could put her in the summer. We could make her look different. We could turn her from a bad guy into a good guy. And we classically over-thought how powerful people's engagement was with her."

It’s refreshing to hear a producer be so honest about one of their own features, but then again Blumhouse are in the enviable position of being able too, with a far greater hits to flops ratio than any other studio currently.

And that’s not to say it’s a bad film; it still plays like a cheesy homage to those eighties flicks, but there’s no denying it just goes too far with character development and a warped storyline, and the franchise just wasn’t ready for the genre jump from horror to action flick with M3GAN now the hero of the piece .

It doesn’t seem to be holding Blumhouse back though, as a third entry in the franchise has already been announced, a spin-off called SOULM8TE slated for release next year, described as a science fiction erotic thriller, which already raises a robotic eyebrow.

But don’t be surprised if this sequel goes on to be a cult classic in years to come however, because it never takes itself seriously, and you suspect that it will finally find its audience, who will fully embrace the upgrade.