Julia Garner has joined Josh Brolin on Weapons, the new film from the director of Barbarian, Zach Cregger.
Julia Garner has been announced as the leading name in the ensemble for Zach Cregger’s soon-to-shoot horror project, Weapons.
We first learned about the film around a year ago when it became the subject of a heated bidding war. Cregger was coming of the back of 2022’s Barbarian, one of the buzziest horror films of that year. Barbarian didn’t just announce an exciting new voice in the horror genre, it also performed commercially earning $45m worldwide, amounting to around ten times its production budget.
With horror being seen as one of the only remaining genres to reliably pull audiences into cinemas, the success of Cregger’s film saw several studios keen to secure his future services. New Line CInema duly won out and around a year ago, the filmmaker’s next feature was announced.
That project is titled Weapons and it is being described ‘as an ‘interrelated, multi-story horror epic that tonally is in the vein of Magnolia.’
The comparison to Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 big swing is an intriguing one and seems particularly apt given that like PTA back in the late-90s, Creggers seems to have been given a fair degree of carte blanche here to make whatever he wants to, an increasingly rare gift for studio filmmakers these days.
Podcast: Barbarian (2022) and Superbad (2007)
Josh Brolin will star, having replaced Pedro Pascal back in February of this year when the latter had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts. The supporting cast isn’t half bad either, given that we’ll be getting Brian Tyree Henry, Tom Burke, Austin Abrams and June Diane Raphael on the call sheet too.
Now the film’s other lead has been announced and our anticipation for Weapons just racheted up another few notches.
Julia Garner, star of Ozark and last year’s The Royal Hotel, will be starring opposite Brolin according to Deadline. As well as being Marvel’s new Silver Surfer in the studio’s upcoming Fantastic Four, Garner is fast making a name for herself as the actor to aim for if your movie requires a lead who can squeeze every ounce of tension from a scene.
As a young actor she excelled on TV’s Ozark, winning awards and matching veteran actor, Jason Bateman blow for blow. Likewise, in the tense 2023 thriller, The Royal Hotel she’s never less than excellent and filmmakers haven’t been slow to catch onto this fact. She was attached to star in the Madonna biopic before that all fell apart but Garner is also set to appear in the upcoming Rosemary’s Baby remake, Apartment 7A, as well as the currently shooting reimagining of The Wolfman at Universal.
We still don’t know when this one is expected to come out but earlier reports suggesting autumn of this year now seem a bit ambitious. When we do hear more though, you can be sure we’ll let you know.
