M3GAN is your phone’s most unsettling chatbot yet

By Cristina Alexander Published April 10, 2025

Blumhouse and Meta are giving you the chance to break every movie theater’s no-texting policy, as they’re launching a new AI chatbot experience called Movie Mate during a new screening of M3GAN on April 30, ahead of the release of its sequel, M3GAN 2.0. And who better to theme the chatbot after the leading killer doll?

Variety reported on the announcement of Movie Mate Wednesday, saying Meta is launching the chatbot program alongside the horror film studio to “augment and uplevel the ‘second screen’ viewing experience” by giving fans a second screen to interact with M3GAN and her namesake film on a deeper level than they have before. Fans who go see M3GAN in theaters at the end of this month will get to talk to the evil doll by DM’ing the movie’s official Instagram account (@M3GAN), and she’ll give access to exclusive content, trivia, and behind-the-scenes information as the movie is playing. It’s like one of those pop-up editions of Disney Channel movies in the 2000s, except you’ll see something to that effect on your phone instead on the silver screen. With M3GAN, it’s all the more exciting and unsettling.

Jason Blum, founder and CEO of Blumhouse, said its collaboration with Instagram’s parent company to bring M3GAN to life in chatbot form via Movie Mate is part of the horror film studio’s Halfway to Halloween campaign, which it is expanding throughout the U.S. after a limited launch last year with return screenings of Ma and Annabelle. The campaign is also part of its 15th anniversary.

“The question we always ask ourselves is why can’t every day be Halloween? So Halfway to Halloween brings us one step closer, and I couldn’t be happier that this year we are going nationwide,” Blum said in a statement. “In that same spirit of trying new things, we’re excited to give M3GAN fans an all-new experience in theaters from the team from Meta.”

If you’re a parent of young teens who may want to interact with the M3GAN chatbot during the movie, which is PG-13, remind them that the character is just a chatbot, not the real thing, and it’s a publicity stunt for the sequel. Character.AI took care of that by inserting a disclaimer in their App Store listing that AI characters are not real before they updated the app with a feature allowing young users to share their weekly activity stats with their parents two weeks ago.

M3GAN 2.0 hits theaters June 27.