How ‘SOULM8TE’ Director Kate Dolan Rescued Her ‘M3GAN’ Spinoff From Studio Purgatory

It seemed like the ideal opportunity. For her first studio film Kate Dolan, an Irish filmmaker who had made a splash with her stylish short film “Cat Calls” and independent feature “You Are Not My Mother,” would get to make an original film that harkened back to a bygone era and also be an expansion of a lucrative franchise, buoyed by superstar producers James Wan and Jason Blum and the marketing might of Universal Pictures. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Dolan’s “SOULM8TE,” a nifty erotic thriller with a very contemporary twist, was nearly derailed by corporate cold feet and proximity to a once-buzzy franchise — “M3GAN” — that halted abruptly. The film was put on pause in post-production and its theatrical release was yanked. Dolan sat in limbo for months, wondering if her movie might never see the light of day. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Universal pivoted to a VOD release on Aug. 1, which will come after a world premiere at Gaze International LGBT Film Festival Dublin on July 31. Now, “SOULM8TE” can be judged on its own terms – as a creepy, sexy, sci-fi-tinged throwback all its own. “Kate was exactly the right person to bring ‘SOULM8TE’ to life. She saw the humor, the horror and the eroticism in this story and combined them all in a fantastically deranged way. She had a blast with the material, and I enjoyed every minute of seeing her tackle this,” Jason Blum, producer and CEO of Blumhouse Atomic Monster, said in a statement to TheWrap. In “SOULM8TE,” David Rysdahl plays an engineer named David working at a cutting-edge robotics company. He’s lost his wife and flirts with a coworker (Claudia Doumit) but still signs up for a test run of the company’s new lifelike AI – a robot in the form of a human woman that he names Sara (Lily Sullivan). Of course, this being a horror movie, things go awry very quickly and soon enough Sara is murdering people and running amok. Dolan said that one of Wan’s producing partners at Atomic Monster had seen and really liked “Cat Calls.” For years she had been talking with the team about doing something in the vein of the short, which is about a woman taking revenge by shape-shifting into a cat monster. When Atomic Monster, Blumhouse and Universal were looking to expand the “M3GAN” franchise after the first film became a surprise smash, they came to Dolan. Wan, Ingrid Bisu and Rafael Jordan came up with an idea for a spinoff, with Jordan writing an initial draft of the script. “SOULM8TE” was in development around the same time as the “M3GAN” sequel and after the writer’s strike in 2023, Dolan finally came aboard. Once Dolan was attached, she made it her own. “What really interested me about the movie was to make something that took the idea of this dangerous femme fatale from erotic thrillers that you would see in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but one that you could really empathize with. She becomes that. She kind of goes from being an appliance to then being that, and what really drives her to that is how maddening it is to try and be a perfect woman,” Dolan explained. “A lot of my work on the script when I came in was to put a female point-of-view on it and dig into those thematic ideas. And what interested me was this idea of loneliness in the modern world and how we’re all really disconnected, particularly men. It was taking their idea and their script and what they wanted to do, and then digging in deeper and finding what the movie was really about.” What makes the movie so interesting is that David at first seems like the hero of the story, but then when Sara starts to live with him, he starts ordering her around and demanding things that you’d probably more closely associate with a chauvinist, 1950s husband than an enlightened modern man. And that was part of the appeal for Dolan. A classic thriller — with a twist “David to me was always a sympathetic character, but it was treading that line because I think not just men, but I think a lot of people, when you have someone taking care of you and doing all those things for you, it’s very easy to slip into allowing that to happen. We all do it in our relationships,” Dolan said. “Our partners will take the load of doing this or that and sit back and you go, ‘Well, they always do that, so I’m not going to do it.’ It was trying to find that nuance of knowing that you shouldn’t be doing this or going down this path, but then getting lured into it by your own need for that care and affection.” Dolan was also inspired, of course, by the erotic thrillers and domestic thrillers of her youth – things like “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” and “Fatal Attraction.” (She also watched “Eve of Destruction,” an underrated thriller that starred Dutch actress Renée Soutendijk as an out-of-control robot.) “These movies were burnt into my brain in my filmmaking journey and I hadn’t really done anything like that before,” Dolan said. When one of the producers described the project as “’Fatal Attraction’ with an android,” she leapt at the opportunity. She remembered thinking, that could be really fun and a way to turn it on its head and take the traditional gender roles in those erotic thrillers, but apply it in a different way because an android is not human. “Soulm8te” (Universal Pictures) “You can have a commentary on men and women, but not necessarily have a hysterical evil woman and you can do that in a different way,” Dolan said. She loved that the movies were so visually striking and wanted to make something “that felt really rich and lush and colorful because in the horror space, a lot of the time you’re making films that are quite dark, and it was nice to think about, Okay, we could do this in a way where everything feels poppy and exciting,” Dolan said. “SOULM8TE,” Dolan stressed, was always going to be a standalone movie. They were preparing the movie at the same time that “M3GAN 2.0” was in development (“Companion,” a similar sci-fi-adjacent romantic thriller, also opened while they were writing “SOULM8TE,” which necessitated a few changes). Last spring, a few months before “M3GAN 2.0” opened, Universal showed off footage from “SOULM8TE” at CinemaCon in Las Vegas. They were bullish. Nothing could go wrong. And then “M3GAN 2.0” opened in June 2025 and was a huge disappointment. Its total worldwide box office gross was a little more than $39 million, which is just $9 million more than what the first movie grossed on its opening weekend in America. A far cry from the $182 million worldwide total of the first film. After the sequel flopped, Universal panicked. Additional movies that were set in the “M3GAN” universe were quietly canceled. A third movie disappeared in a smoke cloud of ones and zeroes. But Dolan still had a movie to finish. ‘SOULM8TE’ on ice After “M3GAN 2.0” opened, “SOULM8TE” — which had been shot and was in post-production — was put on what Dolan described as a “pause.” “Everyone just said we need to figure out what to do next. It was a very uncertain time. I didn’t really know what was going to happen for a while. Your biggest fear is that it’s going to get shelved. You hear those stories of films just getting shelved completely. Your brain goes to that as the worst-case scenario,” Dolan said. “’M3GAN 2.o’ had a massive impact. It was considerable how quickly the trajectory changed of what we were going to do. It was kind of crazy.” Universal removed the film from its January 2026 release date and shut down post-production on “SOULM8TE” as it scrambled to figure out what came next. In fact, Dolan said, she didn’t even finish editing “SOULM8TE” until April of this year. “It was definitely a contracted time to finish the film, more so than we would have had previously,” she said. “But we had a lot of somewhat imperceptible VFX shots in the movie and we got to finish everything like that, as it was going to be finished before. It definitely felt different than how we were a few months previous. But we got to finish the movie, which was the best outcome.” Universal attempted to shop the movie to other studios and streamers, ultimately deciding to release the movie itself, directly to video-on-demand services (it will likely later hit Peacock, Universal’s streaming service). Without the “M3GAN” IP attached to it, “SOULM8TE” was further adrift. Before it came back from its “pause,” Universal had decided it would not be getting a theatrical release. Still, Dolan said that there weren’t any references to “M3GAN” that were “cut out or anything.” From the beginning, “SOULM8TE” was designed to be its own standalone story. “There was going to be other things that they wanted to do that kind of were in that vein,” Dolan said, meaning projects that used a loose “M3GAN” connection to do an original story. “I think it was just the thinking of, Let it be what it is and not have to tie it to ‘M3GAN’ too much.” And while she is saddened that they lost the theatrical component of the release, especially after they hosted some rowdy test screenings during the edit process, the fact that the movie is debuting on PVOD doesn’t bother her all that much either. “A lot of movies that really got me to love filmmaking were films that I watched at home on TV or on VHS or DVD or just playing on TV late at night,” Dolan said. She remembered seeing “Mulholland Drive” for the first time on late night television and how “it changed my whole perception of what a film could be.” And she remembers the rush of seeing her first film, “You’re Not My Mother,” on Netflix, which she noticed people engaging with much differently than when the film had premiered in theaters. “There’s so many people who engage with stuff at home and on streaming,” Dolan said. She thinks these same people will enjoy “SOULM8TE” from the comfort of their overstuffed couch. “What I’ve found is like it’s a film best enjoyed like when you’ve had a few drinks with your friends and you’re just like shouting at the screen and laughing,” Dolan said. “That’s the idea, for people have fun and enjoy it, and not take it too seriously and have a laugh basically.” And while it would be easy to see her slip into another project for Atomic Monster and Blumhouse, perhaps one based on an IP that could withstand an underseen sequel, Dolan said that she is instead working on an original project, based on one of her own ideas. If she does direct another script of someone else’s, well, she’s going to make sure it’s the right one. “I feel like filmmaking for me is always about having a personal connection to the material and having something that I can dig into the thematic ideas that are in the film. I feel like I read lots of scripts and get sent a lot of stuff, and I think I just need something that I can really buy into personally,” Dolan said. “Because when you’re making a film, you’re living with it for several years sometimes, and I think you need to really buy into that story or what you’re trying to say with the movie. That’s my guiding light always. That’s just how I approach every script I get.” One thing’s for sure – whatever her next project will be, it will definitely be less robotic. “SOULM8TE” is available to buy or rent on August 1.