The astonishingly original new horror film Weapons topped the US box office over the weekend and took in $70 million worldwide. First and foremost, it’s another win for a genre whose resilience at the multiplex—in an age when people usually opt to save twenty bucks on a ticket and wait for movies to go to streaming services—has proven impressive and rare. (It sometimes feels like there’s a new horror movie out every couple of weeks, but when they’re making bank, should we be that surprised?) It has also further cemented director Zach Cregger, who announced himself as a filmmaker to watch with 2022’s Barbarian, as a standout cinematic voice.
The reviews have been great, and if there’s a lesson to be learned from Weapons’s opening weekend haul it’s probably that audiences are still down to see movies at the cinema, they just have to be good (see also: Liam Neeson’s The Naked Gun reboot doing decent business amid a dearth of big-screen comedies). Cregger’s film has also been widely acclaimed by critics, with an A- from CinemaScore, suggesting that general audiences have dug it too.
Cregger is now hard at work on his next movie, a reboot of the Resident Evil franchise—based on the zombie outbreak video games from the ’90s and 2000s, as loosely adapted into a blockbuster film series by Paul W. S. Anderson. Nonetheless, such immediate impact and financial success always inspires an obvious question: Is a sequel on the cards? Weapons is very much a self-contained story; we won’t spoil the specific beats here, as you really should go in as blind as possible, but the movie itself doesn’t do much to tease any potential continuation. Nonetheless, never underestimate Hollywood’s ability to find a lucrative way to sequelize.
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Can Weapons Director Zach Cregger Elevate Horror Again?
Cregger’s followup to Barbarian is the biggest, priciest movie he’s ever made, not to mention a litmus test for original IP at the box office—but on set in Atlanta last year, Cregger displayed a Zen calm that was almost scary.
For what it’s worth, Cregger has himself teased that he’s exploring an idea set in “the world” of Weapons. “I can’t help it: I have another idea for something in this world that I’m kind of excited about,” Cregger told Variety. “I’m not going to do it next, and I probably won’t do it after my next movie, but I do have [an idea] and I’d like to see it on the screen one day.” Look, it’s a light tease, and if you’ve seen the film, you’ll probably be just as puzzled as to what he could mean. Another eerie mystery set in the heartland of Twin Peaks and/or The X-Files style America, perhaps? Or will another [redacted] arrive in Maybrook, seeking revenge? Either way, it surely couldn’t involve more kids disappearing from Julia Garner’s school class? Fool me once, you know.
As to the timeline Cregger mentions: well, he said it “probably” won’t be the next film he does after Resident Evil, but that was before Weapons made the big bucks. Should it go on to have a similar sort of impact as Sinners, the other major horror player of 2025—seriously, it has been a huge year for the genre, slasher-sickos rejoice!—we very much foresee an email with the subject line “sequel ideas?” hitting his inbox before the month is out. Good thing he already has at least one. Get cracking, Zach.
This article originally appeared in British GQ.
