‘Weapons’: Is Zach Cregger set to release a new horror classic?
With the release of his endlessly inventive and wildly unpredictable Airbnb horror Barbarian in 2022, writer and director Zach Cregger immediately established himself as an exciting voice in the genre. The gruesome flick, which starred Bill Skarsgård, Georgina Campbell, and Justin Long, was a genuinely scary film that reinvented itself on several occasions across its runtime. It wasn’t all buckets of blood and screams, though, as it also had something vital to say about modern misogyny, societal imbalances between the sexes, and how women should always trust their intuition.
While Cregger’s deft handling of structure and theme in Barbarian would have piqued Hollywood’s interest, it was the movie’s success at the box office that truly made the major studios sit up and take notice. On a minuscule $4.5million budget, the film made a very healthy $45.4m, and Cregger’s next project suddenly took on an entirely different context.
However, when Cregger’s follow-up screenplay, Weapons, hit the market in February 2023, few could have predicted the frenzy it would whip up. Netflix, TriStar Pictures, Universal Pictures, and New Line Cinema all engaged in a bidding war on day one, and within 24 hours, the project had sold to New Line for $38m, with Cregger reportedly sealing a $10m salary and final cut.
This is almost unheard of for a director with so little experience, but it pointed to Weapons being a very special project, and Cregger potentially being a very special director. Hell, Jordan Peele supposedly fired his management team after Universal, on behalf of his Monkeypaw Productions, lost the bidding war. While it’s never been confirmed that this was his sole reasoning, the timing of the Get Out auteur severing ties so soon after Weapons was taken off the market was suspicious, to say the least.
Fast forward a few years, and with Weapons just around the corner from releasing on August 8th, 2025, anticipation for the film is steadily building. The film’s promotional campaign has taken a similar approach to that of Barbarian; namely, everything is shrouded in secrecy. Before the release of the spine-tingling teaser trailer in April, nothing was known about the movie beyond its stars: Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, and Alden Ehrenreich. However, as soon as the world clapped eyes on a group of children waking up in their beds, before silently running out into the night with their arms outstretched in the same bizarre formation, it became clear this film would be creepy as hell.
While the movie’s official synopsis revealed that the story follows a scared community dealing with the aftermath of 17 children disappearing into the night, never to be seen again, the full trailer hinted that there’s much more to Weapons than meets the eye. In fact, Cregger confirmed as much when he spoke to Entertainment Weekly. “That mystery is going to propel you through at least half of the movie, but that is not the movie,” he tantalisingly claimed. “The movie will fork, and change, and reinvent, and go in new places.”
As a final tease, he added, “By the midpoint, we’ve moved on to way crazier shit than that.”
So, with all that said, is Weapons poised to become a new horror classic to add to the canon? Hopes are certainly high, and the fact that Cregger took the same approach to this film as he did with Barbarian is extremely promising. That movie worked like gangbusters because the audience never knew what was coming next, and that was because Cregger himself never knew what was coming next when he sat down to write it.
Incredibly, Cregger didn’t outline Barbarian, instead preferring to discover the story as he went along. He would set up a scenario, write it to the point at which a big reveal loomed, and then come up with that reveal on the fly. It’s why the film has three distinct acts that shift perspective, yet it somehow works perfectly.
Some writers may consider that approach anathema and believe it can only lead to a disjointed final product, but Cregger liked it so much that he decided to use it again. “I didn’t know what it was about,” Cregger said of his sophomore effort. “It was just like, let the movie show itself to me. I want to watch the movie as I’m writing it.”
As if Weapons couldn’t sound more intriguing, Cregger has revealed that his single biggest inspiration for the movie isn’t even from the horror genre. Instead, he set out to write a horror epic in the vein of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, a complex movie filled with characters whose stories all diverge and interweave in surprising ways. “The story is weirder and it’s twistier and it’s bigger,” he explained about the differences between Barbarian and Weapons. “I have way more actors to fit into this thing. The set pieces are definitely bigger.”
Poignantly, the film is also reportedly very personal to Cregger, who unexpectedly lost someone close to him right before he began writing Weapons “as a way to reckon with my own emotions.” How have those feelings of grief and despair been woven into its rich tapestry of missing kids and God knows what else? We’ll have to find out on August 8th.
