Because the horror genre doesn’t have a great track record at the Academy Awards, the world was delivered a special shock at the start of the Oscars ceremony last month. Competing in a super tough category, Amy Madigan took home the Best Supporting Actress prize for her villainous work as Aunt Gladys in Weapons, and while it was definitely a surprise, it was also well-deserved. It was an awesome win, and the victory lap is taking the form of further development for the upcoming prequel movie that Madigan will lead.
We first heard rumblings about a Weapons prequel last fall in the aftermath of the 2025’s movie’s blockbuster success, and today, Deadline is reporting that Zach Cregger has found a collaborator on the project. While the director is currently working on the new Resident Evil movie slated to be released this coming September, he is going to be writing the script for the Aunt Gladys film with screenwriter Zach Shields.
This will be Shields’ first time working with Cregger, but he has plenty of personal experience in the horror genre and writing about monsters. He got his first feature script credit in 2015 co-writing the script for Michael Dougherty’s Krampus, and he reunited with Dougherty in the making of 2019’s Godzilla: King On The Monsters.
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Beyond the fact that the film will take place before the anthology-esque events in Weapons, very little is known about what’s in store for the prequel. It is worth noting that there was a point when the hit horror movie was going to include a segment dedicated to the character’s story, and Zach Cregger providing details about it to CinemaBlend last fall: it was slotted in after Alex’s segment (which now exists as the last segment in the final cut), and it was going to explore a bit of her backstory before she arrived in the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately, the latest trade report about the status of the Weapons prequel doesn’t provide any kind of timeline for its development, but one can imagine that the project is being viewed as a priority for the folks at New Line Cinema after its predecessor earned $270 million at the worldwide box office. It hopefully won’t get rushed in a way that ends up hindering its quality: it’s hopefully recognized that fan would be happy to wait for a really great movie instead of being delivered a work that’s rushed and half baked.
While we wait for more news about the prequel, Weapons is presently available to be streamed with either a HBO Max subscription or an Amazon Prime subscription, and fans of Zach Cregger can look forward to seeing his cinematic vision for the Resident Evil franchise when his sci-fi horror video game adaptation arrives on the big screen on September 18.
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