M3GAN

A toy-company roboticist, suddenly guardian of her orphaned niece, pairs the child with M3GAN, a life-sized AI doll designed to bond with and protect a single child. M3GAN interprets protection expansively.

Gerard Johnstone, from a James Wan and Akela Cooper story, made a slick, funny, PG-13 killer-doll film that became a genuine phenomenon, largely on the strength of M3GAN herself: her deadpan delivery, her dancing, and the way the film treats her as both satire of tech-parenting and a real threat.

It is sharper than it needed to be about outsourcing childcare to a screen, and the doll is a practical puppet, an animatronic and a child actor combined, which is why she has presence.

It was a box-office hit and launched a franchise, and the meme value is inseparable from the fact that it is a well-made film.

The corridor dance is the moment it became inescapable.