'Weapons' first look: 'Barbarian' director makes his 'horror epic' (exclusive) (2025)

The moment the clocks turned 2:17 a.m. on a seemingly random Wednesday morning, 17 children in the fictional Pennsylvania town of Maybrook woke from their beds, exited their homes, and ran into the night. They never came back.

Why did they do it? What happened to them? Are they still alive? Director Zach Cregger didn't have those answers when he started writing Weapons. It was a similar approach he took with his 2022 instant horror hit, Barbarian. "I didn't have an outline. I didn't know what it was about," Cregger tells Entertainment Weekly of his buzzed-about next project in an exclusive interview. "It was just like, let the movie show itself to me. I want to watch the movie as I'm writing it."

It turns out, just about everyone in Hollywood wanted the answers to those questions. A whirlwind bidding war for Weapons whipped up in January 2023. Multiple studios immediately circled this movie from a director that seemingly emerged in the horror space out of nowhere, and it was all thanks to Barbarian.

The Virginia-born Cregger, once a member of comedy troupe the Whitest Kids U' Know, released the horror-thriller through 20th Century Studios with a cast including Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long, and Kate Bosworth. Its seemingly straightforward premise, about a young woman who arrives at the house she rented to find it already occupied, continued to unravel in wild fashion with one big twist after the next. Audiences stayed on the ride, giving a film made on a measly $4.5 million budget a substantial $45.4 million worldwide take at the box office. Whatever Cregger was working on next, producers wanted to be a part of it.

"It was stressful," Cregger, sitting back in the same garage/laundry room where he wrote Barbarian and Weapons, says. "People might think from the outside looking in that I was flinging dollar bills in the air and calling enemies and saying, 'F--- 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."

Cregger still feels, more than two years later, as if the other shoe is going to drop, but as long as he is in this position, he's seizing his opportunity. New Line, the ultimate winner of the bid, will now release Weapons with Warner Bros. in theaters this Aug. 8. Similar to Barbarian, a surface-level logline description about missing kids is but the tip of a massive and wildly complex iceberg.

"That mystery is going to propel you through at least half of the movie, but that is not the movie," the filmmaker divulges. "The movie will fork and change and reinvent and go in new places. It doesn't abandon that question, believe me, but that's not the whole movie at all. By the midpoint, we've moved on to way crazier s--- than that."

As revealed in EW's exclusive first look at some of the cast, Julia Garner (The Wolf Man, The Fantastic Four: First Steps) portrays Justine Gandy, a teacher at Maybrook Elementary who shows up to work one morning to find her entire class — except one student — is missing. Security footage taken from neighboring homes shows the absent kids fleeing into the darkness in the dead of night, all running with their arms outstretched in the same rigid formation.

Josh Brolin (Outer Range, Dune) plays Archer Graff, the father of one of the missing, who finds it suspicious that only children from Justine's class disappeared. Alden Ehrenreich (Cocaine Bear, Fair Play) sports a mustache as a local police officer with a "very complicated relationship" to Mrs. Gandy.

Also confirmed to star are Austin Abrams, Cary Christopher, Benedict Wong, and Amy Madigan, but Cregger teases there are "a couple missing names" from the cast's official announcement.

Adding to the intrigue, Warner Bros. launched a website called MaybrookMissing.com, which contains fake news stories set within the movie, one of which covers the missing children. Another article, however, reports that a woman named Tess Marshall, Campbell's character inBarbarian, escaped from a Detroit rental property, where police found a "network of hidden tunnels."

So, is Weapons somehow connected to Barbarian? Cregger replies, "I don't want to definitively say any way or the other."

In the aftermath of Barbarian's success, Cregger would've found it difficult under normal circumstances to figure out how to capitalize on the moment and get his next project off the ground. However, it wasn't normal circumstances for the filmmaker, who shares, "I had a tragedy in my life that was really, really tough. Someone very, very, very close to me died suddenly and, honestly, I was so grief-stricken that I just started writing Weapons, not out of any ambition, but just as a way to reckon with my own emotions."

Cregger is hesitant to even address what the story means to him. He feels that doing so would rob the audience of the opportunity to engage with the work on their own, but he calls Weapons "an incredibly personal story."

"There's certain chapters of this that are legitimately autobiographical that I feel like I lived," Cregger remarks.

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The director does share one cinematic reference: Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 drama starring Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and John C. Reilly. Ehrenreich's mustache in Weapons, Cregger notes, comes from the one Reilly rocked in this three-time Oscar-nominated film of interweaving storylines.

Weapons and Magnolia couldn't be more different, but Cregger cites their many similarities. It's melancholy, yet it has comedic situations. The sky is regularly cloudy, yet the scenes are colorful. It's a sprawling ensemble, but the characters are fully developed in their own worlds. "I just like that kind of unapologetic, 'This is an epic,'" Cregger says. "I love that movie. I love that kind of bold scale. It gave me permission when I was writing this to shoot for the stars and make it an epic. I wanted a horror epic, and so I tried to do that."

Compared to Barbarian, "It is more ambitious in almost every way. I don't just mean in terms of the budget, but I just mean creatively," he explains. "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."

If you don't believe him, just wait. "I promise you," he says, "when you watch it, you will agree with me. It is."