M3GAN boldly asks: remember fun?

This weekend, the top film at the domestic box office was, predictably, Avatar: The Way Of Water, earning $45 million in its fourth weekend. In second place was M3GAN, the latest very funny entry into the scary doll horror genre, earning $30 million against a $12 million budget. A sequel is already in the works, per Deadline.

Deadline also cites M3GAN’s viral marketing campaign as a key ingredient for its success, which is undeniably true; the moment the first trailer dropped, TikTokers and Tweeters were remixing the brief clip of M3GAN dancing from the trailer over their favorite songs. From there, the film used an army of live M3GANs to promote the film from the top of the Empire State Building, the sideline of a Los Angeles Chargers game, and from the audience of Allison Williams’ Jimmy Fallon appearance. There was a M3GAN Twitter account that you can chat with and will send you vaguely threatening DMs.

Stunts like this so often feel cringey and desperate, but there was something charming about the shamelessness of the M3GANs—like the titular doll in the movie, they were desperate not just for your attention, but your affection. They were coming to you, in their robotic, vaguely threatening way, asking to be liked. And, unlike too many movie marketing campaigns, M3GAN was specific in what it was promising: fun.

It’s not that M3GAN was the only fun movie of the past year, but it may be the only one that positioned fun as the primary reason to go out and buy a ticket. 2022 was always going to be a tough year for the box office as theaters struggled to return to a post-lockdown normal and the word “recession” was constantly bandied about. It was going to be an uphill battle to get audiences out of their homes and into theaters, and studios often stressed the importance of their product rather than the entertainment factor.

Take for example last fall’s Bros. When Billy Eichner was promoting his romantic comedy, he used his media appearances to lean into the dubious claim that the film was the first of its kind as a big-budget, mainstream, gay, romantic comedy. The subtext in all of this was that this movie was capital-I Important, and, as such, you have a responsibility to support it. However, that line may have had the unintended consequence of alienating potential audiences; when Bros underperformed, Eichner took to social media to bemoan straight people staying home as a potential culprit. Anecdotally, more than a couple A.V. Club commenters pointed out that the film’s trailer seemed to tell straight audiences that this wasn’t a movie for them—the “Remember straight people?” line at the end of the trailer was specifically highlighted. (For what it’s worth, the trailer almost exclusively highlighted the worst jokes in an otherwise smartly written romantic comedy.)

Babylon, even more of a box office misfire than Bros, also had a bad trailer that told audiences almost nothing about the film. After seeing the trailer about eight times over the past four months, you still could have assumed it was about how Brad Pitt convinced Los Angeles to allow dogs and actors into restaurants, not how the end of the silent film era brought about a new era of conservatism in Hollywood. And again, there was the frustrating proposition (admittedly, not from the studio itself but from those who work in film media) that there was a moral imperative to go spend money on this movie if you care about Real Cinema. It’s not that this film is particularly good or entertaining, the supporters say, but that if you don’t see this big important film, there will only be fewer big important films.

Even The Way Of Water, far and away the biggest financial success of these films, still leaned into its own importance with its marketing. This wasn’t some dumb Marvel movie—this was something real. This was an artistic undertaking. Kate Winslet thought she died because she held her breath for so long filming the underwater sequences. Those underwater sequences used “revolutionary” technology, according to The Walt Disney Company. Production was so pricey that The Way Of Water famously had to become the third or fourth highest-grossing film of all time to break even. Again, the same subtext emerges: this is an important work, and if you care about film and want further important works to be made, you have to support it.

The thing is, the Avatar franchise is fundamentally kind of goofy. Yes, it deals with themes of colonialism, and the first one was nominated for Best Picture. But it’s also a 3D franchise about 10-foot-tall blue cat-people who have sex with each other via braid and talk to space whales. Seeing a movie like that should be fun. Seeing a romantic comedy should also probably be fun. Seeing a horror-comedy flick about a dancing killer doll should be fun. All of these movies were fun to varying degrees, but somehow, it was only the latter of these that really leaned into this element for trying to get butts in seats.

People are by and large kind of broke right now. Generally, when we tighten our belts, it’s the extraneous (read: fun) stuff that we forgo first, and for a lot of people, that includes paying to see a movie in the theater when you’re already paying for Netflix, and Hulu, and HBO Max, and Paramount+, and Peacock, and, and, and. But it’s also true that when people are struggling, they tend to flock to escapist entertainment: the worlds of Pandora and Wakanda. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get them to see something new. M3GAN and the literal M3GANs climbed the Empire State Building to promise us entertainment, and they’ve already made back their budget and earned a sequel. Sometimes, fun pays.