What does she know? Photo: Warner Bros./YouTube
Barbarian director Zach Cregger is getting ready to drop his Weapons. After a couple years of anticipation, it’s almost time for him to unleash his sophomore effort, a horror film for Warner Bros. that involves children who mysteriously go missing. Cregger wrote and directed the project, which stars Julia Garner and Josh Brolin. Although the latest trailer is still holding the plot pretty close to its chest, we do have a growing arsenal of details about this upcoming film, including when it’s coming out and why people are alleging that Jordan Peele was up in arms about not winning the Weapons bidding war.
All but one child in the same class at an elementary school in the fictional town of Maybrook disappear on the same night at the same time. According to Weapons’s logline, the community is “left questioning who or what is behind their disappearance.” Cregger told Entertainment Weekly that there’s more to the story than the missing kids, though. “That mystery is going to propel you through at least half of the movie, but that is not the movie,” he said. “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 shit than that.”
World of Reel reported that the film features multiple inter-related story lines and is structurally reminiscent of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. The tie-in promo site maybrookmissing.net also includes an article about Tess from Cregger’s Barbarian, which suggests that Weapons is set in the same universe, though it’s not clear if that will factor into the plot.
It doesn’t give too much away. “So this one Wednesday is like a normal day for the whole school, but today was different,” a young narrator says off-screen. “Every other class had all their kids, but Mrs. Gandy’s room was totally empty.” We see footage of the 17 children who got out of bed at 2:17 a.m., ran into the darkness with outstretched arms, and apparently “never came back.” The school principal (Benedict Wong) eventually advises Gandy (Julia Garner) to stay away from the school; Josh Brolin is playing a missing kid’s father who is suspicious about why only her class was affected, and he doesn’t seem to be the only parent with concerns. The two-minute trailer also gives us cryptic shots of Gandy entering a dark classroom of children, a car accident happening in broad daylight, and lots of screaming.
In addition to Garner, Brolin, and Wong, the cast also includes Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Cary Christopher, and Amy Madigan. But Cregger told EW on April 28 that there were still “a couple missing names” from the confirmed cast list — some secret Weapons, if you will.
Well, Hollywood was throwing a lot of money at it. Deadline reported in February 2023 that an auction for Weapons led to a bidding war before the film sold to New Line Cinema for around $38 million. Universal was reportedly the other final contender, vying for the project on behalf of Jordan Peele and his Monkeypaw Productions. After the auction, Peele cut ties with two longtime managers at Artists First, one of whom was also Cregger’s manager. (Cregger told EW this year that the bidding war was a “very high-pressure thing, and people were getting pissed and it was stressful.”) It’s a popular theory online that Peele fired his managers because he was upset he didn’t get the winning bid, but we don’t technically know that for sure — Peele confirmed to Deadline that he was no longer repped by Artists First, but didn’t share a reason for the decision.
Still, that’s not the only evidence that fans are pointing to. In December 2024, Jeff Sneider’s The InSneider reported that the Weapons release date would be moved up to 2025 because positive responses from test audiences made Warner Bros. eager for people to see the film sooner. (Per Deadline, Weapons was originally scheduled to release in January 2026.) Then, in March 2025, Matt Belloni’s Puck reported that Sony had offered Cregger a $20 million salary and a portion of box-office profits for his next movie, a remake of Resident Evil, which some people took as just the latest sign that Cregger did good work on Weapons.
Weapons will be ravailable for mass destruction consumption in theaters and IMAX on August 8, 2025.
