Unless someone else as ghoulish as Aunt Gladys comes along between now and Halloween, get ready for a sea of adults wearing costumes punctuated by bright orange wigs, lips smeared haphazardly with lipstick and enormous eyeglasses. Aunt Gladys, played by Amy Madigan, is among the many memorable characters in filmmaker Zach Cregger’s R-rated Weapons, an original horror movie that is taking the multiplex by storm, much as Jordan Peele’s Get Out hit did in 2017. And just as Get Out became the rare horror title to land multiple top Oscar noms, so could Weapons, with Madigan looking like a contender.
Yet there’s another reason to be on the lookout for Aunt Gladys. Multiple sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that Warner Bros. and New Line, home of Weapons, are already talking with Cregger about making a prequel exploring the origin story of the strange aunt who suddenly arrives in town.
One of Weapons’ conceits is its chapter structure centering on particular characters, and sources say that Cregger actually had a chapter focused on Gladys and some of her backstory. He ultimately pulled that section from the script for length purposes. Now with the movie’s wild success, that lost chapter would be expanded into a full-length story. Sources say no deals have been made, nor is there any timeline.
That’s partly because Cregger is already in prep on his next feature — he wasn’t even in town for the opening of Weapons, as he was in Prague in pre-production on his Resident Evil reboot for Columbia Pictures, for which he is to receive at $20 million payday, an astounding figure for a filmmaker working on only his third feature (not counting co-directing little seen 2011 feature The Civil War on Drugs, which he made far before becoming an A-list director, or 2009’s Miss March for Searchlight.) Evil is scheduled to open in theaters on Sept. 18, 2026.
The question on many lips is: Where will Cregger go next? If he was already a filmmaker on the rise thanks to the out- of-nowhere success of his 2022 debut, Barbarian, Weapons has given him carte blanche and a pen to write his own ticket (with the help of his CAA and Artists First reps, of course).
The Weapons prequel is only one of his options. There is Henchman, an original story that would be for Warner Bros. that now its DC Studios division must seriously consider. And there’s Flood, a sci-fi script that he’s already written.
Whatever film it is, however, there is a better than average chance it will be at Warners. Co-movie chief Michael De Luca was the first exec in town to finish reading the Weapons script and make an offer after Cregger and producer Roy Lee sent it out at 8 a.m. sharp one January in 2023 in a maverick move to spark a bidding war.
Cregger told THR that De Luca called at 9:30 a.m. to say he wanted to make the movie. Hours later, Warners and its genre division New Line won the battle over others, including Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, and agreed to pay $38 million for the project. De Luca also tried to land the rights to Cregger’s Resident Evil, losing that one to Sony, and he’s been eager to get him back into the studio fold ever since.
During the Aug. 8-10 weekend, Weapons opened to $43 million domestically, more than $10 million ahead of expectations and a huge sum for an original title amid the overall horror downturn at the box office. This week started off with Weapons firing up $5.2 million at the domestic box office, the best August Monday gross ever for a horror title, not adjusted for inflation. That leaves the film with a domestic tally of $48 million and $83 million globally through Monday.
In terms of the next steps, Cregger was playing it coy in the days ahead of the movie’s opening. “Everything in this business changes on a dime. On the other side of Resident Evil, I may not be able to make anything,” he said in a THR interview. “You just never know.
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