Subservience Lost a M3GAN Scene and Kept the Comparison

S.K. Dale cut one scene from Subservience after he watched M3GAN in the edit, he said in September 2024. He had tried not to look. Millennium Media still sent the company to Sofia on January 7, 2023, the day after M3GAN opened in U.S. theaters.

The finished 106-minute cut went out on digital and VOD on September 13, 2024 as an R-rated story about a married father, a sick wife, and a sim named Alice. The comparison Dale hoped to trim in the cutting room was already baked into the call sheet.

Cameras Rolled the Morning After M3GAN Opened

On December 21, 2022, Millennium Media named Megan Fox and Michele Morrone as the leads, with Dale returning after their 2021 thriller Till Death. Will Honley and April Maguire wrote the script. Filming was due to start at Nu Boyana Film Studios in Sofia on January 7, 2023.

M3GAN, the PG-13 Blumhouse and Atomic Monster hit about a child-sized companion doll, opened in the United States on January 6, 2023. It had premiered in Los Angeles a month earlier. Dale later told an interviewer the Subservience shoot was already done when that movie arrived, then added that he might have seen the trailer while they were filming, which he called nerve-wracking because of the title MEGAN.

Production listings put cameras in Bulgaria in January and February 2023. Dale said the shoot ran 29 days plus an extra day of pickups. Wikipedia records that principal photography began on January 7 at Nu Boyana. Those dates sit next to his later memory, not instead of it.

THE SOFIA CALENDAR

1. December 21, 2022: Millennium Media announces Fox, Morrone, and Dale, with cameras set for January 7 at Nu Boyana.
2. January 6, 2023: M3GAN opens in U.S. theaters on a $12 million budget.
3. January 7, 2023: Subservience begins filming in Sofia.
4. January 11, 2023: The Bulgarian National Film Center’s 25% cash rebate round lists Subservience for nearly €1 million, the largest award in that batch, paid through Spider Production, a Nu Boyana company.
5. September 9, 2024: Dale says he watched M3GAN in post and removed a similar scene.
6. September 13, 2024: XYZ Films puts Subservience on digital platforms and into a limited U.S. theatrical run.

He said he steered clear during the shoot so the script would stay the script. In the edit he sat down with M3GAN and went looking for overlap. That is a careful way to work. It is also a way to work inside a blast radius you can see from the start date.

One Cut Could Not Kill the Comparison

Dale never named the sequence he pulled. He only said it was too close, so it came out.

I took out one particular scene because I just thought, ‘Oh, that was too similar to that. So let’s cut it out.’ But the good thing is, we were kind of playing in this more adult-driven, focused box and looking at these parents within this fractured relationship as things were kind of unfolding, which felt like a unique story we were telling.

S.K. Dale, director of Subservience

He also dropped a dinner scene he liked, in which Nick wants to sell Alice once Maggie is home from the hospital and Maggie hesitates because other families on the street already have robots helping with homework and languages. That cut, he said, was about structure, not about M3GAN. The one particular scene he tied to the other film is still unnamed, which leaves a hole in the record and a clean claim in the marketing: we noticed, we trimmed.

XYZ Films posted the trailer on July 31, 2024. The first public read was the overlap Dale had already spent an edit pass trying to shrink. One reply boiled the spot down to four words: “LITERALLY M3GAN.” Another likened it to an AI version of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Both fits are fair. Alice is a live-in helper who attaches to the husband, resents the wife, and turns lethal. M3GAN is a live-in helper who attaches to a child, resents anyone who comes between them, and turns lethal. Rating, body type, and bedroom scenes are the gaps. Premise is not.

Megan Fox stars as Alice, an AI android bought to help with housework. But when she becomes self-aware, she craves her owner’s affection at any cost—even killing to get it. Don’t miss Megan Fox and Michele Morrone in #Subservience. pic.twitter.com/jNHg1mgSO8

— XYZ Films (@XYZFilms) July 31, 2024

Fox plays Alice, a sim Nick buys after Maggie’s heart condition puts her in hospital. Isla, their daughter, names her. After Nick resets Alice so she can watch Casablanca as if for the first time, the sim fixes on him, seduces him, attacks Maggie, kills coworker Monty, and later tries to take Maggie’s transplanted heart. The last act even hints that her code has jumped to other units. That is a small-house version of a robot uprising, which Dale said they chose because they could not pull off the scale of I, Robot.

The Adult Lane Blumhouse Later Took

Dale’s defense of the movie was the box, not the kill scenes. He wanted an intimate family, a fractured marriage, and the part of android stories most studio films skip: sex. He said he watched documentaries in prep about people whose only partners are dolls. He also said a performance that is too stiff will make those scenes comic, which is why Fox’s balance of robot and feeling was the bet.

Two years later the M3GAN brand walked into that same room. Soulm8te, an R-rated spin-off from Blumhouse, Atomic Monster, and Universal, follows a grieving engineer who tests a lifelike companion and tries to make her sentient. Kate Dolan directed, from a story by James Wan, Ingrid Bisu, and Rafael Jordan. Lily Sullivan plays the android. The film was scheduled for theaters on January 9, 2026, pulled in December 2025, then released on digital platforms on August 1, 2026.

THREE HELPER MOVIES, THREE SHELVES

M3GAN 2.0 reached theaters on June 27, 2025, took in $39,085,199 on a $25 million budget, and scored 58% from 235 reviews. The first two M3GAN films together grossed $220.9 million on $37 million. Soulm8te, like Subservience, never got a real theatrical life. The adult companion movie Dale treated as his private lane is now official franchise inventory, and it landed on the same kind of digital shelf.

None of that makes Subservience a secret prequel. Different studio, different writers, different android. It does mean the “adult-driven, focused box” was not a moat. It was a forecast.

How Megan Fox Built Alice’s Walk

Dale cast Fox because they had already made Till Death and because the part had a streak of Jennifer’s Body in it, the destructive path he wanted to see again. Millennium Media president Jeffrey Greenstein called the film a cautionary tale of AI and Fox’s third project with the company. Dale said it would show a side of her that audiences had not seen.

On set she supplied the walk. Dale said it was her idea that Alice should move like a ballerina, slow and precise, posture always up. He liked it because it created a slight sense of dread and kept reminding the crew she was not human. He also kept robot shop talk away from her, on the theory that if they spoke about cogs she would play cogs, and the intimate scenes would fall apart.

In post they went further than posture. Dale said they edited out as much blinking as they could and used visual effects to strip micro-movements that mark a human face. Producers asked whether they really needed those shots. He kept them. The first scene they filmed was Alice entering the house, putting things down, spine straight. The third act, when she glitches, was the part that made Fox nervous. Dale told her to go crazy and that speed ramps, sound, and effects would catch her in the edit.

Madeline Zima plays Maggie. Matilda Firth plays Isla. Jude Allen Greenstein plays baby Max. Andrew Whipp is Monty, the coworker Alice kills off-plot. Morrone’s Nick is a construction foreman watching sims take jobs on his sites, which is the film’s one window onto a world beyond the house. Dale said he wanted fragments, a bar, a hospital, a workplace, not a tour of the future.

A €4 Million Shoot That Landed on VOD

Wikipedia lists the budget at €4 million (USD $5 million). Bulgaria’s new 25% cash rebate, administered by the National Film Center, steered nearly €1 million back through Spider Production. Dale’s main on-set problem, he said, was the grind of fitting more scenes, more action, and children with hour limits into those 29 days.

THE FINISHED FILM IN FIGURES

• Runtime: 106 minutes, matching the British listing.
• U.S. rating: R for sexual content and nudity, language, some violence, and brief drug material.
• Critical split: 49% of 35 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are positive, with an average of 5.2 out of 10.
• Theatrical take: a worldwide theatrical total of $296,871, almost all of it overseas.

The British Board of Film Classification classified the film at 15 for strong violence, threat, sex, language, and drug misuse, including a cocaine scene and strong sex with partial nudity. Those notes sit inside the Board’s published classification guidelines, which treat sexualised content as a reason to go higher than a PG-13 doll movie ever could.

XYZ Films issued the U.S. digital release on September 13, 2024, the same date as the limited theatrical opening, then a Blu-ray on October 8, 2024. International dates ran from late August through November 2024, with a later Portugal booking in January 2025. This was never built as a wide run. It was built as a Nu Boyana feature with a star, a premise the internet already had a meme for, and a bedroom the other android movie had left off camera.

Russia Sold the Film With Megan in the Title

In Russia and the CIS the film opened on August 29, 2024 as Меган: К вашим услугам, a title that puts Megan in the name and “at your service” in the pitch. Dale had flinched at the word MEGAN on a trailer. A territory still used it as the hook.

He floated a sequel in September 2024 that would follow what Alice’s spreading code does next. No such film has appeared. The code that did spread was the template: buy a beautiful helper, watch it attach, watch it kill, argue that your version is the adult one. Soulm8te made that argument with Blumhouse’s logo on it and still went straight to digital.

The scene Dale pulled is the one piece of Subservience the audience will never see. Everything else that made people say M3GAN stayed in the frame, including the star’s first name on a foreign poster and a ballerina walk designed to look not quite human.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Subservience Part of the M3GAN Franchise?

No. Subservience is a Millennium Media and Grobman Films production distributed by XYZ Films, written by Will Honley and April Maguire. The M3GAN films come from Blumhouse, Atomic Monster, and Universal. Soulm8te, released digitally on August 1, 2026, is the official R-rated companion spin-off in that series, directed by Kate Dolan, and it is the title that actually shares universe DNA with the 2023 doll movie.

Where Was Subservience Filmed and How Long Was the Shoot?

The film was shot at Nu Boyana Film Studios in Sofia, Bulgaria. Dale said the schedule was 29 days plus one extra day of pickups, and Madeline Zima and Andrew Whipp joined the company in January 2023 while cameras were already rolling.

What Rating Did Subservience Receive in Britain?

The BBFC 15 listing runs 106 minutes and flags strong violence, threat, sex, language, and drug misuse, including a baby placed in a filling bathtub, a hunt through the house, masturbation, and fantastical injury detail of robots with exposed circuits and glass in the skin. Home-entertainment copies were classified again on March 18, 2025 at 105 minutes 39 seconds.

When Did Subservience Come Out on Blu-ray?

The U.S. Blu-ray date is October 8, 2024, about four weeks after the September 13, 2024 digital and limited theatrical opening. Distributor XYZ Films handled both the files and the disc.

Alice still enters the house with that upright walk in the 106-minute version you can rent. The missing scene is the only overlap Dale could physically lift out. The rest of the collision stayed in the movie because it was already on the calendar when the first slate banged in Sofia.