When it was released last year, Zach Cregger’s Weapons was a huge hit, in every conceivable way. The horror film cemented Cregger’s status as a modern auteur of the genre after having hit it big with Barbarian just a few years prior, becoming both a bona fide blockbuster and a universally acclaimed modern horror classic. There was tons to love about Weapons, but undoubtedly one of the elements that made the biggest impact with folks was the character of Aunt Gladys, as played by Amy Madigan.
Gladys became so iconic that Madigan even won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress last year, something that has only happened a handful of times over the past century for films in the horror genre. Thus, a new horror icon was definitively born, with the only problem relating to any further installments being that Gladys was pretty definitively torn to meaty shreds by a gaggle of children in Weapons’ finale. Fortunately, Cregger revealed he actually had plans for a prequel that Madigan could star in as the infamous antagonist. But now, it’s been revealed that the Weapons prequel isn’t moving forward as anticipated.
The initial idea for a Gladys-centric prequel actually stemmed from the creative process of writing Weapons itself. Long before the film had achieved even a modicum of success, when Cregger was still in the weeds of constructing the story on the page, he had written an entire sequence of the film that would dig into Gladys’ origins and where she came from. As is, Weapons shifts character perspectives multiple times throughout the film, with chapters named after whatever character that portion of the film is following. According to Cregger, there was a version of the script that actually had an entire Gladys section, but the idea was ultimately dropped in favor of keeping the runtime shorter and preserving the mystique surrounding the character.
But shortly before Weapons was released, Cregger began speaking about an idea he had for a prequel, revealing soon after that it was the aforementioned Gladys sequence, stretched to feature length. And while this Gladys prequel is still happening, it will be with much less direct involvement from Cregger himself. The initial idea floated was that Cregger would write and direct the prequel himself, though that was never confirmed. The first official piece of information released relating to the prequel said that its script was to be co-written by Cregger and Zach Shields, with a then-unannounced director to be tapped soon after. Now, however, Cregger is clarifying that he is no longer going to be a credited co-writer on the film and that Shields is exclusively responsible for the feature-length script.
This is a bit disappointing, but ultimately not surprising. Cregger has very quickly become one of the most in-demand filmmakers in the industry. He has Resident Evil coming out in just a few weeks and then is heading straight into production on his collaboration with Steven Spielberg, Flood. He clearly has other priorities at the moment, and the Gladys prequel undoubtedly wants to strike while the iron is still hot, so it has been placed into the hands of other creatives, set for release in 2028.
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