On paper, Soulm8te seems like a hit. Developed by the hottest horror-movie studio in Hollywood — Blumhouse/Atomic Monster, which recently had a huge (if not unprecedented) hit with Curry Barker’s Obsession — it’s a spinoff of another well-received movie (2023’s M3GAN) that touches on hot-button contemporary issues like AI, male entitlement, and the rise of submissive “tradwives.” A film with a similar premise, Companion, did quite well with critics and at the box office just last year. So why is it being dumped onto VOD?
Blame M3GAN 2.0, if you like. Although this winking update on the T2: Judgement Day “bad robot gone good” formula had its ridiculous merits — in her review, Inverse’s Hoai-Tran Bui called it a “grand, absurdly fun good time [that] takes the original film’s campy send-up of a tired genre and gives it a genre remix” — it failed to take off with audiences, barely making back its budget at the box office and eventually ranking as one of 2025’s biggest flops.
