Barbarian (watch it HERE) writer/director Zach Cregger has assembled a strong cast for his mysterious horror project called Weapons, including Julia Garner (Ozark), Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo), Benedict Wong (Doctor Strange), Amy Madigan (Antlers), Austin Abrams (Euphoria), June Diane Raphael (Grace and Frankie), and Cary Christopher (Days of Our Lives)… and we’re going to have the chance to see that cast face the horrors Cregger has conjured up when Weapons reaches theatres on August 8th. Cregger has said that he was drawing inspiration from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia when he was crafting this one – but now we have confirmation that his movie actually won’t be nearly as long as Magnolia. While Anderson’s movie had a running time of 188 minutes, Cregger’s film has the more bladder-friendly runtime of 128 minutes. Which is 26 minutes longer than Barbarian.
World of Reel got the runtime from the British Board of Film Classification and Coming Soon got it from the Irish Film Classification Office.
Most details about Weapons are shrouded in mystery. It has been said that it’s “an interrelated, multistory horror epic” that’s tonally in the vein of Magnolia, and the story revolves around the disappearance of elementary school kids in a small town. Here’s the official synopsis: 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.
Garner’s character is Justine Gandy, “a teacher at Maybrook Elementary who shows up to work one morning to find her entire class — except one student — is missing. Security footage taken from neighboring homes shows the absent kids fleeing into the darkness in the dead of night, all running with their arms outstretched in the same rigid formation.” Brolin’s character is Archer Graff, “the father of one of the missing, who finds it suspicious that only children from Justine’s class disappeared.” Ehrenreich “sports a mustache as a local police officer with a very complicated relationship to Mrs. Gandy.”
Cregger produced the film with Roy Lee and Miri Yoon of Vertigo and J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules of BoulderLight Pictures. At one point, Pedro Pascal of The Last of Us was set to star in the film with and Renate Reinsve of The Worst Person in the World. Pascal had to leave the project so he could star in the Marvel Cinematic Universe reboot of Fantastic Four (which Garner also has a role in) instead, and it appears that Reinsve followed him out the door.
Cregger, who wrote the script without an outline and let the story evolve as he went, previously told Entertainment Weekly that the mystery of the missing children “is going to propel you through at least half of the movie, but that is not the movie. 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.“
What do you think of the Weapons runtime? Are you looking forward to having this movie throw “crazy sh*t” at you for 128 minutes? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
