SOULM8TE arrives on Hulu on Thursday, October 1, where it will open the service’s Huluween slate. Hulu announced the date Tuesday, and the genre press picked it up the same afternoon.
It is the first subscription home the M3GAN spinoff has had, and it caps a release history that took the long way around. The film was dated for theaters on January 2, 2026, then moved to January 9, then pulled off the calendar entirely — Deadline reported in December 2025 that Universal was looking for a new distributor. It eventually premiered at Dublin’s Gaze International LGBT Film Festival on July 31 and went to digital the next day through Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.
What Is Actually In It
Kate Dolan (You Are Not My Mother) directs and co-wrote the screenplay with Rafael Jordan, from a story by Jordan, James Wan and Ingrid Bisu. A grieving engineer is handed a tech giant’s new artificially intelligent android to test. He tries to program her into a genuinely sentient soulmate. She develops needs of her own, and the mayhem that follows is described in the studio’s own copy as precision-engineered.
Lily Sullivan, who carried Evil Dead Rise and is credited here as Sara/Lydia, leads the cast. David Rysdahl (“Alien: Earth,” “Fargo”), Claudia Doumit (“The Boys”) and Arty Froushan (“Daredevil: Born Again”) fill out the cast.
Dolan Knew Exactly How It Sounded
The director has been refreshingly direct about the pitch. “When Blumhouse Atomic Monster first approached me about an erotic thriller set in the M3GAN-verse, I thought, are you insane? But something drew me in,” Dolan said when the digital date was announced. “We exist in a bizarre time where companies sell us ‘connection’ through apps, algorithms, and AI. Yet those are the same forces pulling us apart.”
She also supplied the viewing instructions: “It is a satirical, unhinged movie that explores desire, obsession, autonomy and control. It’s a movie that knows how ridiculous it is, and I’d argue it’s best watched the way you’d watch Basic Instinct or Showgirls now, with friends, a drink in hand, and zero shame about shouting at the screen.” That is a more honest marketing line than most studios will let a filmmaker say out loud, and it happens to be the correct one for a Huluween night.
Where the Franchise Stands
The original M3GAN was a genuine hit. M3GAN 2.0 was not, and genre outlets have consistently tied the theatrical cancellation of SOULM8TE to that sequel’s soft summer. Nobody at Universal or Blumhouse has said so on the record, so treat the connection as the reasonable read it is rather than a confirmed one. No further M3GAN films are currently announced.
A film pulled from a wide January release and buried on VOD in August is not usually a film anyone builds a Halloween season around, which makes October 1 a small second chance. We covered the trailer and that digital date back in July, and ‘Clown Panic’ and Adam Scott’s ‘Hokum’ are landing on the same service this season. For everything else worth queuing up there, our guide to the best horror movies on Hulu stays current.