Blumhouse/Atomic Monster 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. In an interview on The Town podcast, studio head Jason Blum said that he “overthought” the sequel, overestimating audiences’ affection for the character and her universe. Maybe M3GAN was just a sleeper hit, in other words, and its sequel was a hard lesson in not assuming that every meme needs to become its own cinematic universe. But there was one major problem: By the time M3GAN 2.0 revealed the limits of Blumhouse’s prospective new franchise, Soulm8te was already in production. Soulm8te was first announced back in June 2024, and at that time was set for a New Year’s Day 2026 release. Since then — presumably sometime after M3GAN 2.0 flopped in June 2025 — someone at the studio reconsidered this plan, withdrawing the movie’s theatrical dates and repositioning it as a late summer VOD release. The plot summary has changed little since then: Both Deadline’s 2024 writeup and Blumhouse/Atomic Monster’s new press release tease a story about an engineer who attempts to reprogram an AI android to become his “truly sentient soulmate” after the demise of his wife. This goes horribly wrong, obviously, and bloodshed ensues. Why not just shelve it, if a M3GAN spinoff now looks like a bad idea? To be totally blunt, Obsession made a shitload of money. And — while unintentional — the intensity with which Sara (Lily Sullivan) clings to her human paramour is reminiscent of how Nikki (Inde Navarrette) behaves after being transformed by an ill-fated wish in that film. That being said, tonally they’re very different. Obsession is a dark and hopeless film, while based on its trailer Soulm8te seems to be taking more of a campy approach. Director Kate Dolan — previously best known for her atmospheric Irish folk-horror film You Are Not My Mother — says as much in a press release: “It's a movie that knows how ridiculous it is, and I'd argue it's best watched the way you'd watch Basic Instinct or Showgirls now, with friends, a drink in hand, and zero shame about shouting at the screen,” she writes.Dolan’s reference to Basic Instinct is not a coincidence: Soulm8te was originally pitched as a “90s-style erotic thriller,” a genre that nearly petered out in the 2010s and is now making a bit of a comeback in films like Babygirl, Bone Lake, and the upcoming Night Nurse. The timing is right, in other words, or at least right enough to overcome any studio jitters and bet on at least a modest release. It doesn’t seem all that indebted to the previous M3GAN movies, either, unless the trailer omits a key scene where Sara and M3GAN team up to storm Sara’s ungrateful creator’s apartment with machine guns. Now that would be worth the rental fee. Soulm8te will debut exclusively on digital platforms for rental or purchase starting August 1.