Blumhouse’s erotic robo-thriller SOULM8TE has had a rough life. Initially intended for theaters, the film was shunted off to digital unceremoniously after its sister film, M3GAN 2.0, underperformed at the box office. But there’s great news coming for the forgotten film: it’s coming to Hulu next month.
Directed by Kate Dolan from a script she co-wrote with Rafael Jordan, SOULM8TE stars Lily Sullivan, David Rysdahl, Claudia Doumit, and Arty Froushan, and follows an engineer attempting to reprogram an AI sexbot to cope with the loss of his wife. But when her programming goes awry, she becomes more than he bargained for in the most dangerous way possible.
The film was originally announced in 2024, after M3GAN did banger numbers at the box office in 2023, earning almost $200 million on a budget of just $12 million. Planned as a spinoff to the franchise, SOULM8TE was originally planned for a January 2026 release, before being unceremoniously yanked from Universal’s release calendar. Eventually, it premiered at the Gaze International LGBT Film Festival in July before being pushed to digital platforms the very next day.
Whether its arrival on Hulu will boost public perception of the spinoff is unknown, but it seems encouraging that it’s being brought to a streamer as a part of their Halloween offerings, rather than just being left to collect dust in the annals of horror history. Given the success of Blumhouse’s other films this year — most notably the likely oversaturated hype of Obsession — they must be more confident in their output than they originally seemed.
SOULM8TE arrives on Hulu on October 1.
