M3GAN 2.0's Director Told Me Why THAT Song Was Picked For The Music Number (And I Still Can't Get Enough)

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Credit: Universal Pictures

SPOILERS ahead for the latest of new horror movies, M3GAN 2.0, now playing in theaters.

Y’all, M3GAN is kind of a triple threat. Along with fronting her first sequel, now as an action star on top of horror icon, as she showcased in the first movie, she can also dance and sing on command. After she stunned with her own rendition of Sia’s “Titanium” and got TikTok dance famous in the original, it was a non-negotiable that she’d flaunt her talents again.

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When CinemaBlend spoke to writer/director Gerard Johnstone over Zoom about M3GAN 2.0, he told us the story behind the killer doll’s latest music number in the sequel. In his words, the song and dance were inevitable:

I knew that I wanted to have a song in the movie at some point. I had to have a dance, and I had to have a song. Those are the two things that I thought I've gotta give the audience, but I want to do it in a way that's really unexpected.

Along with M3GAN dazzling a crowd with her dance moves in a completely different outfit than we usually see her in, the director landed on having her sing Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” to Allison Williams' Gemma about midway through the movie while she’s trying to speak to her role as an aunt. As he continued in our interview:

I just thought it would be really funny if this time around she [sang] to Gemma, 'cause I just knew that Gemma was not gonna be able to stomach it, and would just be the perfect recipient of it. And, a lot of this movie is about humanizing M3GAN a little bit.

In the new movie, which we gave a 3.5 out of 5 in our M3GAN 2.0 review, the killer doll becomes the ally of Gemma and Cady when an even more dangerous version of her named AMELIA is constructed and on the hunt to kill them both. In order to stay safe from AMELIA, Gemma is forced to rebuild M3GAN, and she kind of becomes a heroine instead of the villain.

Credit: Universal Pictures

And in a hilarious moment where M3GAN is trying to console Gemma, M3GAN belts out “This Woman’s Work,” which he got the rights to after personally writing a letter to Kate Bush about his intentions (via USA Today).

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I especially love how the whole scene ends with Gemma shushing her from singing. Johnstone also told us why it was the perfect song with these words:

In this particular case, she’s trying to do something that she thinks is going to make Gemma feel better, and it just clearly makes it far worse. And in terms of the song choice, I'm just a big, big fan. Have been for a long, long time. And,I actually wanted M3GAN to sing this Woman's Work in the closing credits of the first movie, but it was an idea that came to me just far too late to do anything about it. So it'd been in the back of my mind, and it's such a great song about motherhood. So it just felt apt.

Funny enough for the singer of the 1988 track, which was originally written for the movie She’s Having A Baby, this isn’t the first time a horror property has gotten in touch with her over using one of her songs. She also famously allowed Stranger Things to use her song “Running Up That Hill” and it became a chart-topper again in 2022 because of it.

While Johnstone doesn’t know what Kate Bush thought about the finished scene, I know I personally can’t get enough of the song choice. It was so funny to see Gemma get serenaded by M3GAN, and it was a magnificent song choice I'll be thinking about as the movie makes its way through theaters and eventually onto streaming, where I can watch it again.