Director Zach Cregger’s offbeat horror Weapons has made a sizeable $70m at the box office, ahead of Freakier Friday and a dwindling Fantastic Four. Eighteen-rated, tonally eccentric, and directed from an original screenplay, Weapons sounds like the sort of movie Hollywood studios would ordinarily cross the street to avoid. Yet director Zach Cregger’s horror-mystery has ... Weapons makes a $70m killing at the box office
Director Zach Cregger’s offbeat horror Weapons has made a sizeable $70m at the box office, ahead of Freakier Friday and a dwindling Fantastic Four.
Eighteen-rated, tonally eccentric, and directed from an original screenplay, Weapons sounds like the sort of movie Hollywood studios would ordinarily cross the street to avoid. Yet director Zach Cregger’s horror-mystery has managed to make a sizeable impact at the box office over the weekend, pulling in $70m worldwide.
That’s far ahead of Disney’s family-friendly comedy sequel Freakier Friday, which made $44.5m, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which has again dropped precipitously on its third week of release. The latter’s still made a healthy-sounding $434m worldwide to date, but placed against a production budget of around $200m before marketing’s taken into account, it becomes clear that Marvel’s superhero opus will take some time to properly break even.
Weapons, by contrast, has a comparatively frugal budget of about $38m (a shade less than Freakier Friday’s $42m), so it has far less work to do before it begins to make a tidy profit. To put it in a bit of genre-related context, Ryan Coogler’s similarly original, R-rated horror Sinners (budget: $90m) made $87.3m worldwide on its opening weekend, and ultimately made over $365m in cinemas. That makes it one of the year’s bigger hits, just behind Marvel’s more expensive Thunderbolts* and ahead of Disney’s CGI reboot, Snow White. Barring some huge stumble over the next few weeks, Weapons shouldn’t be too far behind that box office haul.
Deadline also has some other Weapons stats: its numbers are currently tracking far above earlier genre releases in comparable overseas markets – in other words, it’s predicted to make more money than such films as Smile, Speak No Evil, Evil Dead Rise and M3GAN did on their opening weekends.
Read more: Weapons, and why 2025 is the year horror dominates the box office
Why should the average movie-goer care about such numbers? Because it’s proof that, in the right circumstances, audiences will turn up and support 18-rated, tonally eccentric movies based on original screenplays. Cregger’s film benefited from some canny marketing and an ear-grabbing high concept: in a quiet American suburb, 17 school kids get up in the early hours of the morning, flee their houses and vanish into the night.
But the film itself has proven to be more than hype; the central performances from Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich and Amy Madigan (among others) are roundly superb, and the plot is unafraid to go to some very strange and unpredictable places.
The critical response has been overwhelmingly positive, and so far, it looks as though New Line Cinema (and Warner Bros, its distributor) has landed another genre hit.
Between this, Sinners, Bring Her Back and too many others to list, 2025 has been an unusually good year for original genre films. In an otherwise uncertain landscape for cinemas and entertainment in general, Weapons offers a rare glimmer of hope: with numbers like these behind it, maybe movie studios will be encouraged to place their money behind other original and refreshingly weird screenplays.
