In 2022, Drew Hancock had come up with a great idea for a killer robot movie. It came “fully baked into my brain,” he tells Inverse: Three couples go into a cabin in the middle of the woods. One of them discovers they’re a robot. “And then things go south from there,” Hancock says. He got to work on a script for Companion right away, and the thing practically wrote itself. It was an easy horror structure — a character “would get picked off every 10 pages,” as the group dealt with the killer robot. It was “one of those movies we've seen a billion times, which is AI gone wrong,” Hancock says. He finished the script quickly. And six months later, M3GAN, Blumhouse’s sleeper hit about a — you guessed it — killer robot opened in theaters. But thankfully, at that point, Hancock had already reversed course in a major way. |