Following last week's eerie first teaser, Warner Bros. and New Line have released the first full trailer and poster for Barbarian director Zach Cregger's highly-anticipated second feature, Weapons.
Though descriptions suggest that the CinemaCon footage was slightly different (there's no clown at the end), this looks every bit as creepy and unsettling as those reports claimed.
The trailer begins with a child's voiceover recounting what occurred at 2:17 am on the night every student (bar one?) in Mrs. Gandy's (Julia Garner) classroom "woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs and into the dark, and they never came back." From there, we're introduced to Josh Brolin's character, who clearly blames Gandy for his son's disappearance, as the headmaster (Benedict Wong) advises the teacher to take some time off.
"That mystery is going to propel you through at least half of the movie, but that is not the movie," Cregger told EW in a recent interview. "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 sh*t than that."
Some of that "crazier sh*t" can be glimpsed towards the end of the trailer, as we see flashes of ghostly, clown-faced children, a woman stabbing herself in the face with a fork, pale zombie-like people (possibly the kids as teens?) crashing through a window, what appears to be someone vomiting a black, tar-like substance in another person's face, and a very quick (almost subliminal) look at what we assume is the female clown mentioned in the CinemaCon breakdown.
Cregger calls Weapons "an incredibly personal story," adding that "there's certain chapters of this that are legitimately autobiographical that I feel like I lived." He declines to confirm or deny whether this film has any connection to Barbarian, however. "I don't want to definitively say any way or the other."
From New Line Cinema and Zach Cregger, the wholly original mind behind Barbarian, comes a new horror/thriller: Weapons. When all but one child from the same class mysteriously vanish on the same night at exactly the same time, a community is left questioning who or what is behind their disappearance.
The film stars Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Cary Christopher, with Benedict Wong, and Amy Madigan.
Cregger directs from his own screenplay, and also produces alongside Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules, with Michelle Morrissey and Josh Brolin executive producing. The filmmaker’s creative team behind the camera includes director of photography Larkin Seiple, production designer Tom Hammock, editor Joe Murphy and costume designer Trish Sommerville. The music is by Ryan Holladay, Hays Holladay and Zach Cregger.
New Line Cinema Presents a Subconscious/Vertigo Entertainment/Boulderlight Pictures Production, a Zach Cregger Film, Weapons. The movie will be released on 8th August 2025 by Warner Bros. Pictures.