Billboard Women in Music 2025
“Barbarian” mastermind Zach Cregger is officially back, bringing a deeply unsettling look at his latest film, “Weapons,” to CinemaCon 2025.
During a robust Warner Bros. presentation at the Las Vegas gathering, Cregger proved why he’s one of the most coveted directors currently working in the lucrative genre. This time around, he’s assembled an ensemble led by Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong and June Diane Raphael.
Garner stars as an elementary school teacher having possibly the worst day ever, when one morning she arrives to school to find her entire first period class disappeared the night before.
“Mrs. Gandy’s room was totally empty,” recounts an innocent but ominous little girl in a voiceover on the trailer cut exclusively for global movie theater owners. “Because the night before, at 2:17 a.m., every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs and into the dark and they never came back.”
As the small town where Cregger’s horror show is set reels from the news, Garner’s teacher becomes the focal point of parental and administrative anger. It’s not long before these missing kids start appearing to her as apparitions — rocking hollow eye sockets and disturbing smiles. Brolin plays a particularly heartsick parent coming for Garner and demanding answers about his missing daughter.
We can’t stress how upsetting some of this footage was — featuring children sleepwalking giddily as if possessed, running into the pitch dark. The final moments of the trailer revealed a terrifying figure hiding deep in the woods, one that looked overwhelmingly like a female clown.
New Line Cinema chief Richard Brener described the film as “intriguing and unpredictable, with a nice helping of batshit insane. We think you’ll appreciate the ride.” Cregger himself said the project was “a movie that unravels and reinvents itself as it goes.”
Expectations are high, as Cregger’s“Barbarian” rocked the genre and provided a much needed hit in 2022 for Warner Bros. Discovery’s fledgling streaming service Max. It also grossed close to $50 million at the box office on a modest $4 million budget.
Warner Bros. clearly liked what they saw in “Weapons.” The film was originally scheduled for a January 2026 release (a month that is experimental, to use the kindest possible word to describe that timeframe), but in recent weeks, it was pulled way up to August of this year.
The film will now open a week after “Together,” another genre event film that sold to Neon out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
