Paul Walter Hauser in ‘Americana’. Photo: Lionsgate.
Preview:
Paul Walter Hauser is joining the cast of the new ‘Resident Evil’ movie.
Austin Abrams is also starring.
Zach Cregger has co-written and will direct.
Even given the massive popularity of the Capcom game series, ‘Resident Evil’s treatment on screens big and small has been hit or miss. Paul WS Anderson’s movies had their fun elements, but even they outstayed their welcome. And the more recent Netflix TV treatment didn’t exactly delight fans.
Zach Cregger (director, ‘Resident Evil’) at CinemaCon 2025 for Sony Pictures at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace on March 31, 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo by Stewart Cook/Sony Pictures via Getty Images.
The exact details of how the director –– who has written the script with ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’s Shay Hatten –– will adapt the games, but he has at least opened up a little.
Here’s what Cregger told Inverse about his approach:
“I am the biggest worshiper of the games, so I’m telling a story that is a love letter to the games and follows the rules of the games. It is obedient to the lore of the games, it’s just a different story. I’m not going to tell Leon’s story, because Leon’s story is told in the games. [Fans] already have that.”
And at CinemaCon this year he described the concept as this:
“It’s built in the spirit of those games and follows one central protagonist from point A to point B, as they descend deeper into hell.”
Where else can we see Paul Walter Hauser?
(L to R) Paul Walter Hauser plays Ed Hocken Jr. and Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr. in ‘The Naked Gun’ from Paramount Pictures.
‘KPop Demon Hunters’ is the technical winner of this week’s box office.
The movie has been on Netflix for two months but landed in theaters for a sing-along version.
‘Weapons’ also continues to do well.
Netflix is not traditionally a company that releases its movies on the big screen, preferring to drive people towards the app on TVs and elsewhere. There have been exceptions –– award-worthy movies scored short qualifying theatrical runs and Greta Gerwig negotiated an IMAX run for her in-the-works ‘Narnia’ effort.
But there hasn’t been anything like ‘KPop Demon Hunters’, the story of a K-pop superstar girl group who also just so happen to save the world from demonic forces, which has been on the streaming services servers for two months now, surging to become the second-most watched movie on the platform, with some of its songs soaring into download charts.
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Netflix decided to ride the movie’s popularity, and released it as a “sing-along” version on 1,700 screens across North America (and more internationally), scoring a reported figure of between $18-$20 million, which makes it the highest grossing release of the weekend. But there’s an asterisk…
Here’s where things get more complicated. Since Netflix doesn’t release box office figures and wouldn’t comment about ‘Demon Hunters’ actual earnings, the data comes via exhibition sources and rival studios with access to certain data.
So the actual, final tally may never be known.
Which means that Zach Cregger’s successful horror pic ‘Weapons’ technically counts as the top earner for the weekend with $15.6 million from 3,631 cinemas in its third week for an impressive global total of nearly $200 million, through Sunday.
What else happened at the box office this weekend?
If we are to fully count ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ as the top of the charts, that makes ‘Weapons’ a strong second place.
Disney’s ‘Freakier Friday’ fell to third place, making $9.2 million for a global total of $112.3 million.
Fourth was ‘Fantastic Four: First Steps’, which despite early promise hasn’t really lived up to Marvel’s hopes. It took in $5.9 million for a current global total of $490.1 million.
And in fifth, we find animated outing ‘The Bad Guys 2’, which made $5.1 million and had earned $149.1 million globally.
In other box office news, Apple’s ‘F1’, the Brad Pitt-starring racing drama, roared past $600 million worldwide this weekend to become the most successful original movie of 2025.
Can I watch the Sing-Along version of ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ at home?
You can! In a move that surprised few, Netflix announced that the sing-along version of the movie would arrive on servers on Monday August 25th, so by the time you’re reading this, you’d be able to go and sing along to “Golden” or ‘Takedown” in the comfort of your own home (though from the viewing figures, plenty of you were already doing that).
We’ll admit we weren’t major fans of writer-director Zach Cregger’s feature debut, ‘Barbarian.’ While we appreciated its opening act and the film’s overall unpredictability, we were left dissatisfied by some uneven acting and a sense that it was two stories stapled together. Cregger’s second feature, ‘Weapons,’ is a whole different scenario. Once again Cregger experiments with narrative structure and tonal shifts, and while he occasionally loses his balance, he brings his various plot strands and character arcs together in a much more cohesive fashion while maintaining a better mix of dread and macabre humor.
This makes ‘Weapons’ one of the best horror outings of 2025 to date – not too shabby in a year that’s already seen the release of excellent genre fare like ‘Sinners’ and ‘Together.’ ‘Weapons’ may not have as much of the social commentary of those films, but it’s a frightening, gripping tale that still – in the tradition of authors like Stephen King – has something to say about small town paranoia and the mistreatment of children.
If you’ve seen any of the trailers for ‘Weapons,’ you know the premise: one night at exactly 2:17 a.m., 17 children from a third-grade class in the town of Maybrook all wake up in their homes and run off into the night, never to be seen again. A month later, law enforcement, school officials, and parents – led by the grief-stricken Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) — have no clues about what happened; only one child from the class, Alex (Cary Christopher), remains, while the town’s suspicions fall mainly on the class teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner).
All that essentially happens in the first 10 minutes of the movie, with some of it narrated by a child who hints at the bizarre nature of the events to follow. And bizarre they are: ‘Weapons’ is the kind of movie that it’s better to see with as little foreknowledge as possible about what’s to come, and the film takes off in some unexpected directions from its initial setup before coming full circle.
Cregger relates this through a series of interlocking stories for each of his main characters – including Justine, Archer, a town cop and former lover of Justine’s named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a local homeless junkie named James (Austin Abrams), school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong), and Alex himself. Every story overlaps to some degree with the others, although told from the point of view of whatever character it’s focused on, and they all dovetail in the film’s third act. While this creates a bit of a repetitive rhythm as the movie goes on, each character’s tale varies enough from the others and reveals a bit more each time of the mystery at the movie’s center, keeping one transfixed as the horrific picture becomes clearer.
Cregger handles this looping structure extremely well for the most part, while also balancing a nicely expanding sense of dread and terror with moments of truly morbid humor that spring organically from the increasingly ghoulish situations he concocts. That tightrope act goes a little off the rails in the third act, as the violence escalates rapidly and some of the finale veers a touch too far into unintentionally comedic terrain – but not enough to dilute what’s come before. There are also a few plot holes along the way if one looks hard enough – but again, not enough to stop this from being an absorbing, scary trip.
Some of the film’s key sequences provide genuinely terrifying payoffs to the atmosphere that Cregger patiently builds in slow-burn fashion, aided by Larkin Seiple’s moody cinematography and an excellent, wide-ranging score by Ryan and Hays Holladay as well as Cregger himself. For most of its 128 minutes, ‘Weapons’ is a tightly-woven tapestry of horror that doesn’t over-explain itself and retains a singular filmmaking vision.
‘Weapons’ is the definition of an ensemble piece, with excellent performances from all involved. Julia Garner seems much more confident and well-cast here than she was in her previous horror outing, ‘Wolf Man,’ as Justine, the teacher with just enough of a murky past that her clear love for her students is used as a – dare we say – weapon against her. Josh Brolin is also reliably outstanding as Archer, the actor using the innate tension between his gruff, tough guy façade and empathetic interior to create a fundamentally decent human being who is pushed to his limit by the loss of his son.
The underrated Alden Ehrenreich uses his chameleonic skills well as the equally vulnerable Paul, while Austin Abrams and Benedict Wong offer some of the film’s more humorous moments. And Cary Christopher is heartbreaking as Alex, the little boy suddenly left alone by nearly everyone in his life. Each of these characters gets more development than is often usual in horror films, which only adds to the viewer’s investment when all are placed in peril. And there’s one other performance about which we’ll say little – except that it’s thoroughly chilling.
While the horror genre itself is not having as dependable a year as usual at the box office (sorry, Blumhouse), Warner Bros. Pictures is bucking that trend: following the surprising ‘Final Destination Bloodlines’ and the transcendent ‘Sinners,’ this is the studio’s third creatively successful fright fest in a row.
What makes it even more gratifying is that this is a wholly original and personal piece. The menace at the heart of ‘Weapons’ is one that other films have touched on before, but not quite in a scenario and setting like this. In that sense, ‘Weapons’ and ‘Barbarian’ do share common ground – the idea that evil can spring from the most unexpected places at random moments, albeit after festering out of sight for years. It’s a worldview and an approach that Zach Cregger is, pardon the expression, weaponizing to create some of the most interesting work in the genre right now.
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What is the plot of ‘Weapons’?
One night, all but one child from Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) classroom mysteriously run off into the night. Justine and the rest of the community are left questioning who – or what – is behind the children’s disappearance.
(L to R) Shawn Hatosy, Laura Harris, Josh Hartnett, Clea DuVall and Elijah Wood in 1996’s ‘The Faculty’. Photo: Miramax Films.
Preview:
A new take on Robert Rodriguez’ ‘The Faculty’ is in the works.
Rodriguez and ‘Barbarian’s Zach Cregger are producing this remake.
The original starred Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, Josh Hartnett and more.
Are you ready to go back to school?
No, we don’t mean the depressing return to campuses after a holiday –– Miramax is looking to revisit 1998 sci-fi thriller ‘The Faculty,’ in which a group of highschoolers discover that something is very wrong with their teachers and other staff.
In what is a rarity for those involved in the legacy title, Rodriguez will be an active part of the behind-the-scenes team on the remake, as Variety reports that he’s on board as producer.
But he’s not alone: Zach Cregger, who broke out big with his own genre offering, 2022’s horror thriller ‘Barbarian,’ is also producing.
Cregger is teaming up with Drew Hancock, the writer/director behind new thriller ‘Companion,’ (which Cregger produced), and Hancock will write the screenplay for the new ‘Faculty.’
We can certainly see some rich material for a new version of the story, since social media is much more rampant among highschoolers (and, er, everyone else), and that could play a big part.
Robert Patrick in 1996’s ‘The Faculty’. Photo: Miramax Films.
The storyline for the original movie is a take on the tension between highschoolers and their teachers.
When some very creepy things start happening around school, the kids at Herrington High make a chilling discovery that confirms their worst suspicions: their teachers really are from another planet.
As mind-controlling parasites rapidly begin spreading from the faculty to the students’ bodies, it’s ultimately up to the few who are left, an unlikely collection of loners, leaders, nerds, and jocks to save the world from alien domination.
The original story was dreamt up by writers David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel, with the final production script crafted by ‘Scream’s Kevin Williamson.
It grossed an impressive $63.2 million and has developed a cult following in the subsequent decades.
Who appeared in the original movie?
(L to R) Shawn Hatosy, Josh Hartnett, Laura Harris, Clea DuVall and Elijah Wood in 1996’s ‘The Faculty’. Photo: Miramax Films.
Rodriguez, as usual, has a wealth of projects in development. He most recently directed ‘Spy Kids: Armageddon’ for Netflix, which was released in 2023.
He’s currently busy making TV series ‘El Gato,’ which focuses on Frank Guerrero, who discovers that his deceased father was the legendary, titular vigilante.
Returning to Mexico, Frank becomes embroiled in family power struggles while uncovering his father’s connections to a contemporary terror plot.
Beyond that, Rodriguez has long been developing a new version of animated series ‘The Jetsons.’
Cregger, meanwhile, is following ‘Barbarian’ with ‘Weapons,’ a multistory horror movie about the disappearance of high school students in a small town.
He’s also recently announced that he’s attached to write and direct a reboot of the ‘Resident Evil’ video game adaptations, just the latest to tackle the story of a virus that turns the population of a town (and beyond) into undead nightmares.
When will this remake of ‘The Faculty’ be in theaters?
Elijah Wood in 1996’s ‘The Faculty’. Photo: Miramax Films.
Miramax, which released the original, is backing the new one, but has yet to announce a release date for this one.
And with no director in place yet, chances are it’ll be a while before we see too much movement.
While we’re doubtful that the likes of ‘No Country for Old Men’ would get remade (though little surprises us these days), a new ‘Scary Movie’ is headed our way, with the Wayans brothers returning to craft the film for Paramount. It’ll be scaring up business in cinemas next year.
Josh Hartnett in 1996’s ‘The Faculty’. Photo: Miramax Films.
Alden Ehrenreich as Luke in ‘Fair Play.’ Cr. Courtesy of Netflix.
Preview:
Alden Ehrenreich is joining ‘Weapons’.
It’s the new horror movie from ‘Barbarian’s Zach Cregger.
Josh Brolin and Julia Garner are also in the cast.
Given that his breakout film, horror movie ‘Barbarian’ in 2022 generated huge buzz for its tricky, intense structure and went on to earn $45 million worldwide (which doesn’t sound like much, but was 10 times its production budget), it’s hardly surprising that writer/director Zach Cregger saw plenty of studio interest in his follow-up.
Justin Long in ‘Barbarian’. Photo: 20th Century Studios.
Neither Cregger nor New Line have been particularly forthcoming about a plot for ‘Weapons’ which we can understand –– after all, ‘Barbarian’, about an Airbnb stay that goes gruesomely wrong, worked because people didn’t know what to expect.
What we’ve learned so far is that ‘Weapons’ has been compared to Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Magnolia’, hinting at a web of interconnected stories and characters related to a central mystery.
But whatever it turns out to be, the concept is clearly intriguing enough that studios and streamers offered to buy it sight unseen when the announcement came that Cregger had a new script in the works. New Line emerged triumphant, guaranteeing him a healthy payday, a guaranteed greenlight and final cut.
This is what New Line’s president and CCO, Richard Brener, said in a statement:
“Zach proved with ‘Barbarian’ that he can create a visceral theatrical experience for audiences and that he commands every tool in the filmmaker toolbelt. We couldn’t be happier that he, Roy Lee and Miri Yoon, and J.D. Lifshitz and Rafi Margules chose New Line to be the home of his next film, and hope it is the first of many to come.”
Cregger has been in pre-production on the movie, with the shoot scheduled to kick off in May.
You bet! Thanks to the film’s development needing to be delayed because of the writers and actors’ strikes, there has been some shifting on the ensemble front. While Pedro Pascal and ‘The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve were attached at one point, they’ve both since had to move on to other projects (Pascal is a particularly busy man with ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2 underway and work on Marvels’ ‘The Fantastic Four’ on his To Do list).
Still, Brolin, Garner and now Ehrenreich are nothing to sniff at in terms of casting, and you know Cregger will have attracted others on the strength on his previous work.
Ehrenreich had a busy 2023, appearing in a variety of projects including ‘Cocaine Bear’, ‘Fair Play’ and a little movie called ‘Oppenheimer’.
When will ‘Weapons’ be locked and ready to load into theaters?
New Line has not yet announced a release date for ‘Weapons’, which given that cameras are only now about to roll, feels wise.
Alden Ehrenreich in 2018’s ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story.’
