After a bidding skirmish for the rights, the in-demand Zach Cregger has set up his third film at New Line in the space of a month.
At the end of January, it was revealed that Zach Cregger had signed a very handsome deal with New Line Cinema to make his next film, Weapons. The director certainly made a splash last year with Barbarian, announcing himself as a bold new name in horror. New Line (as part of Warner Bros) moved quickly to secure his services following the departure of James Wan to Universal.
As the deal was signed, it seemed that Cregger had negotiated a pretty sweet mandate to to push through projects at a production level too. New Line seemed keen to utilise Cregger in a similar fashion to horror filmmakers and producers, James Wan and Jordan Peele, and that has certainly come to the pass with the announcement of three Cregger projects in the last four weeks.
Weapons will be Cregger’s next film as director and is said to revolve around ‘witchcraft and missing children and will be told via multi and inter-related stories.’ As a producer, Cregger has already set up Companion, a horror thriller that it is being fast-tracked for production this year, alongside Weapons.
Now though, Cregger has added another film to the production slate in the form of Occupant, a project that caused a brief bidding war between Paramount, Lionsgate, Amazon and New Line when the rights to the short story came up for grabs. ‘Occupant is described as a reverse haunted house story. Instead of a family moving into an abode, here a historical house is moved for preservation purposes into a neighbourhood. Scares ensue.’
It’s certainly out of the ordinary for a young filmmaker to be handed so much power, even considering the success of Barbarian. Still, if it means more films of a similar freshness and quality we can’t see too many people complaining. We’ll bring you more on these projects as we hear it.
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