So Soulm8te is finally happening. After sitting on a shelf for the better part of two years, the M3GAN spinoff from Blumhouse Atomic Monster just dropped its first trailer and locked in a release date: August 1, exclusively on digital platforms. No theaters, no wide release, just you, your couch, and what is being described as a 90s-style erotic thriller with a tech twist.
The setup is genuinely interesting. A grieving engineer gets hired by a ruthless tech company to test their new AI companion android. He starts tinkering with her programming, trying to make her feel more sentient and real, and she responds by becoming completely obsessed with him and violent toward anyone who gets close. It's basically what would happen if you gave the Companion movie a Blumhouse budget and told the director to go unhinged with it.
That director is Kate Dolan, an Irish filmmaker whose debut feature You Are Not My Mother was a slow-burn folk horror film that premiered at TIFF Midnight Madness in 2021 and earned serious critical respect. She knows how to build dread and how to make something feel genuinely off underneath a surface that looks almost normal. Dropping her into an erotic sci-fi thriller sounds chaotic in the best possible way.
Lily Sullivan plays Sara, the android at the center of everything. If you saw her in Evil Dead Rise, you already know she can carry a horror film. The rest of the cast includes David Rysdahl, who you might recognize from Alien: Earth, Claudia Doumit from The Boys, and Arty Froushan from Daredevil: Born Again. This is not a no-name VOD cast.
The movie went straight to digital largely because M3GAN 2.0 bombed hard last summer, pulling in only $39 million globally compared to $180 million for the original 2023 film. That made Universal nervous about the whole franchise, and Soulm8te quietly disappeared from the release calendar. What's actually refreshing is that Dolan herself is leaning into the home release. She's on record saying the movie is best watched the way you'd watch Basic Instinct or Showgirls now: with friends, something to drink, and zero inhibitions about yelling at the screen. That kind of self-awareness is hard to fake.
Honestly, the whole situation makes this more appealing, not less. A satirical, R-rated AI thriller that knows it's a little ridiculous, made by a director with real horror chops, dropping on the first weekend of August when you're tired of paying $20 to sit in a cold theater. Before you watch it, pull up the original M3GAN if you haven't seen it recently. The franchise started as a genuinely clever piece of tech paranoia and Soulm8te seems to be carrying that same energy into stranger, more adult territory.
No comments yet