Never do a question mark in the title of an article, unless you can’t quite figure out what’s happening with Soulm8te. Ah, now this is interesting. Last year, we got the release of M3gan 2.0 (pictured), a film that did that rarest of things for a sequel, and took a massive swing. It effectively switched ... Soulm8te reappears, gets a rating, but who’s actually going to distribute it?
Never do a question mark in the title of an article, unless you can’t quite figure out what’s happening with Soulm8te.
Ah, now this is interesting. Last year, we got the release of M3gan 2.0 (pictured), a film that did that rarest of things for a sequel, and took a massive swing. It effectively switched genres from the original movie, but in this case, it didn’t work. The film wasn’t great, the audience fell away, and plans for a sort of M3gan movie universe seemed to be on the cards.
So much so in fact that the first spin-off, Soulm8te, was already deep in production, with a release planned for sometime this year. Universal was set to release, with Blumhouse Productions behind the feature.
Kate Dolan has directed the film, which comes from a script by Dolan, Rafael Jordan and Phil Lord. Furthermore, the movie is finished. But, towards the end of last year, came the news that Universal was yanking it off its release schedules. It was unclear if this was to do with the box office performance of M3gan 2.0 or because of an issue with Soulm8te. We do know that a finished film was stuck in limbo.
Or is it? Because in a bit of a plot twist, the movie has now gone through the American ratings system. A new listing at the Motion Picture Association of America website (MPAA to its chums) has confirmed an R rating for the movie, which it earns for “strong violence, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, and language.”
Ah yes. For this is the film that reportedly crosses the robots/AI ideas in M3gan 2.0 with a saucy thriller, a Venn diagram of themes I can’t say I was expecting. On the MPAA website too, the distributor remains listed as Universal, which suggest that it’s not sold the film onto someone else, at least not yet.
Conversely, a search of assorted release lists, and there’s no tangible sign of the movie actually reaching our eyeballs. It was originally due in early January 2026, but the fate of the film remains uncertain. Perhaps the process of getting MPAA certification was already in process before the film was dropped from Universal’s immediate plans? Or, just as likely, it’s being prepped for a streaming release or something?
The question mark in the title, then, is genuine, and not some clickbait whataboutery. Who is going to distribute the film and how remain key questions. But we know now that it’s finished. We don’t know if it’s any good. There’s just an off-chance now we might find out…
