Weapons (Zach Cregger)

Moviegoers anxious to find out whether Zach Cregger’s second major feature, Weapons, has, as they say, the juice—that is, whether Cregger’s follow-up to his 2022 breakout horror hit Barbarian will nail the same nasty-smart satiric combination that made the previous movie so much more than the simple “Airbnb rental gone wrong” flick it initially looked like—are in luck. Weapons, which stars Josh Brolin and Julia Garner, was previously slotted to show up in theaters in January of 2026, in that cold, fallow period where horror movies occasionally strike gold. Now, though, a pretty major schedule shuffle at Warner Bros. means the movie—about a small Florida community where kids suddenly disappear in the middle of the night—is coming this year, landing in a plum August 8 spot.

“But wait!” encyclopedic memorizers of the Warner Bros. film release schedule are now demanding. “Wasn’t August 8 reserved for Paul Thomas Anderson’s next movie, One Battle After Another?” And indeed it was, as Deadline notes that the film—Anderson’s second adaptation of Thomas Pynchon, this time starring Leonardo DiCaprio—has been bumped back a month, and now opens on September 26.

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New Line unwrapped a sneak peek at Weapons in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

During the Warner Bros. studio presentation at CinemaCon, the division dedicated part of its time in the spotlight inside the Colosseum at Caesars Palace to showing off the highly-anticipated horror film from Zach Cregger. The genre pic stars Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, June Diane Raphael, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Alden Ehrenreich and Amy Madigan, among others.

Cregger did the honors himself by coming to the stage but keeping his comments brief due to the spoiler nature of his “twisty and turny” movie. “The material we’re going to show is the tip of the iceberg,” said the filmmaker, adding that the script reinvents itself as it goes. He also made sure to mention that the teaser that played for CinemaCon attendees was exclusive and likely to not ever been seen by the public.

The footage featured a voiceover by a young girl who reveals specific details about the story, which centers on the events that follow when the students in a classroom led by Garner’s character, a teacher, suddenly and mysteriously disappear. “Mrs. Gandy’s room was totally empty, and do you know why?” says the little girl. “Because the night before at 2:17 a.m., every kid woke up, got out of bed and walked downstairs into the dark. And they never came back.”

As the voiceover played, scenes showed children doing just that as they disappeared into the night. Parents and community members understandably respond with shock and anger as they are seen in a town hall-style meeting during which Brolin’s character yells, “I don’t understand at all. Why just her classroom, why only hers?” Another resident demands to know, “Where are our children?” A school administrator is seen later advising Garner’s teacher to keep some distance from the place as the investigation continues.