Filmmaker Zach Cregger’s next film, the thriller “Weapons,” looks like it’s armed and ready to do fire. Yesterday, Alden Ehrenreich joined the cast, which already includes Josh Brolin and Julia Garner, indicating how fast Cregger shot to the A-list of directors. Previously, Cregger had been a member of the comedy troupe “The Whitest Kids U’ Know,” an actor in sitcoms, and had directed one feature, 2009’s comedy, “Miss March,” not exactly known as an auteur-like filmmaker.
But IMDB credits are deceptive. Cregger actually had a lot of filmmaking experience under his belt: 53 episodes of “The Whitest Kids U’ Know,” various music videos, and other TV, so when it came time to direct his follow-up feature, the 2022 horror “Barbarian,” all his experience culminated in a big suspenseful hit that was exceptionally well directed, seemingly take a page out of Hitchcock and Spielberg with a create sense of blocking, framing and frightening camera moves (read our review).
READ MORE: ‘Barbarian’ & The 20 Best Horror Films Of 2022
“Barbarian” was one of the biggest breakout films of 2022 and one of the most talked about, as it seemingly came out of nowhere for most critics and pundits. Opening at #1 at the box office and holding a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score, “Barbarian” earned ten times its production budget of $4.5 million, grossing more than $45 million worldwide.
Suddenly, Cregger became super in demand, and the filmmaker was making tons of deals for his next film. He has several options, but “Weapons” is next, and clearly, names like Brolin, Garner, and Ehrenreich speak to all the A-listers that want to work with him (“The Last Of Us” star Pedro Pascal was originally aiming for the project, but had to drop out due to scheduling issues).
Brolin recently appeared on an upcoming episode of our Bingeworthy TV podcast, where he was on to discuss the upcoming second season of the “Outer Range.” We asked him about working on the forthcoming “Weapons,” and he had much praise for Cregger. Still, he admits he had to do a bit of investigative homework and ask around about why it connected with younger audiences so much.
“A lot of people really liked ‘Barbarian,’ I called around about ‘Barbarian’ — and I don’t mean to be an asshole to Zach [Cregger] and be like, ‘What did you think of this movie??’ But I kind of did that because I liked it, and I was intrigued by it,” he explained. “But the younger demographic was obsessed with it, and my daughter, [actress] Eden[Brolin], loved it. Absolutely loved it.”
READ MORE: ‘Weapons’: Julia Garner Joins Josh Brolin On Zach Cregger’s Upcoming Horror Epic
Brolin admitted he was a bit on the fence, perhaps a little wary about a “new” filmmaker and their potential inexperience, but once he met Cregger, his confidence about it grew and grew, and now he thinks he’s going to one-up his last film.
“So, yeah—I was going back and forth about it, and I had a couple of meetings with Zach about it, and once I made the decision of ‘Yes’— and there were a lot of options around at that moment for me,” he said about his initial hesitation and other offers that he could have taken. “But I’ve felt better about it with each passing day. I’m super excited about doing the movie. I think it’s a brilliantly designed and written script. Zach is a special dude. This one’s better [than ‘Barbarian’].”
Currently, not much is known about the film other than that it is a multi-story horror epic with interconnected stories about high school kids going missing in a small community, which certainly sounds quite thrilling.
THR recently said that “Weapons” is in the vein of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 film “Magnolia” in the way it interconnects the lives of many disparate people, though with a much different genre in the background. “Weapons” is supposed to start shooting in mid-May, so perhaps more casting news will surface imminently. More from the Brolin interview closer to the release of Prime Video’s “Outer Range” on May 16.