Zach Cregger’s buzzed-about “Barbarian” follow-up ignited a Hollywood bidding war.
He’s finally ready to reveal what he’s been working on.
They never came back.
Julia Garner as Justine Gandy in ‘Weapons’.Credit:Warner Bros. Pictures
Why did they do it?
What happened to them?
Are they still alive?
Josh Brolin as Archer Graff in ‘Weapons’.Quantrell Colbert
DirectorZach Creggerdidn’t have those answers when he started writingWeapons.
It was a similar approach he took with his 2022 instant horror hit,Barbarian.
“I didn’t have an outline.
“It was just like, let the movie show itself to me.
I want to watch the movie as I’m writing it.”
Whatever Cregger was working on next, producers wanted to be a part of it.
“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.”
17 kids flee their homes in the dead of night in ‘Weapons’.Warner Bros. Pictures
So, isWeaponssomehow connected toBarbarian?
Cregger replies, “I don’t want to definitively say any way or the other.”
Cregger is hesitant to even address what the story means to him.
17 kids flee their homes in the dead of night in ‘Weapons’.Warner Bros. Pictures
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WeaponsandMagnoliacouldn’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 toBarbarian, “It is more ambitious in almost every way.
“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 thanBarbarianis.”
If you don’t believe him, just wait.
