Following a surreal, eerie social media countdown, Warner Bros. and New Line have released a new trailer for Barbarian director Zach Cregger's highly-anticipated second feature, Weapons, and it features plenty of unsettling new footage.
Though the trailer keeps the movie's biggest secrets hidden, there are a few more hints about what exactly is going on, and the final 30 seconds or so contain what certainly appear to be some significant plot spoilers.
The trailer begins with Julia Garner's Mrs. Gandy addressing the parents of the children that went missing from her classroom. A child's - presumably the only one that didn't disappear - voiceover then recounts what occurred at 2:17 am on the night every other student in her class "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.
The voiceover also tells us that "people die in really weird ways in this story."
"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, someone stabbing themself in the face with a fork, pale zombie-like people (possibly the kids as teens?) crashing through a window, and Benedict Wong's character looking positively terrifying as he screams while bleeding from his eyes.
Cregger has called Weapons "an incredibly personal story," adding that "there's certain chapters of this that are legitimately autobiographical that I feel like I lived." He declined 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."
Check out the new trailer below.
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.