“So this one Wednesday is like a normal day for the whole school, but today was different,” a child narrator says in Weapons‘ trailer. Every other class had all their kids, but Mrs. Gandy’s room was totally empty. And do you know why? Because the night before, at 2:17 in the morning, every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs, and into the dark. And they never came back.”
When his 2022 debut film, Barbarian, was released, it surprised everyone by becoming a favorite among both audiences and critics. With its creepy premise and shocking ending, it became not only a favorite horror movie but also a favorite film of the year for many. Anticipation for Zach Cregger’s follow-up was immediate. If we’re to believe Cregger, we won’t be disappointed.
“It is more ambitious in almost every way,” he told Entertainment Weekly about Weapons. “I don’t just mean in terms of the budget, but I just mean creatively. The story is weirder and it’s twistier and it’s bigger. I have way more actors to fit into this thing. The set pieces are definitely bigger. It’s just a bigger, weirder movie than Barbarian is.”
‘Weapons’ Mysterious Website Suggests a Link to ‘Barbarian’
Along with the creepy new trailer, Warner Bros. and New Line launched MaybrookMissing.com. The fake website, called Maybrook News, features a photo of Mrs. Gandy (played by Julia Garner) being escorted out of the school. An article about the missing children accompanies it.
Underneath the article are three screenshots meant to depict various security cameras. They show the kids running, arms outstretched, out of their homes. âI donât understand at allâwhy her classroom? Why only hers?â reads a part of the article, about the outburst of Josh Brolin’s character, Archie Graff, in the trailer.
But the most mysterious aspect of the website is another article titled “Underground Prison Discovered in Rental Home.” The story talks about a local woman, Tess Marshall, who “escaped the home under shocking circumstances and an actor was found dead nearby.” We know that this is refers to Barbarian, which leads us to the question: are the two films intertwined?
Cregger’s answer, “I don’t want to definitively say any way or the other,” leads us to believe it is.
The Film Was at the Center of a Bidding War
Thanks to the success of Barbarian, everyone wanted Weapons before Cregger had even finished writing it. In the end, the bidding war came down to New Line and Universal, with Jordan Peele’s MonkeyPaw producing. Peele was even willing to take a deferred payment based on the profits, according to Deadline.
But, for whatever reason, Universal and Peele walked away, and New Line snagged Cregger’s sophomore film for an astounding $38 million. Unheard of for a director who had only made one previous film.
“It was stressful,” Cregger told Entertainment Weekly about the bidding war. “People might think from the outside looking in that I was flinging dollar bills in the air and calling enemies and saying, ‘[explicit] you.’ The truth of the matter was it’s a very high-pressure thing, and people were getting pissed and it was stressful. I didn’t totally get to unclench and appreciate what happened until maybe a week later when the dust settled and the adrenaline subsided.”
Why was everyone so interested? Simple: Barbarian made $45.4 million globally on a $4.5 million budget, and everyone is convinced that Weapons will be an automatic grand slam. We’ll find out if it is on August 8, 2025.
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