SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Weapons. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
While coming together as a cohesive whole, Weapons is a film built on characters and perspectives. A single narrative is fractured into six separate chapters that both overlap and fit together like puzzle pieces – each hitting a special climax before moving on to the next. From Justine (Julia Garner), the schoolteacher, to Alex (Cary Christopher), her only student who didn’t disappear, the movie gathers its momentum via the points of views of the key people involved in the larger mystery haunting the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania.
Really, the only perspective we don’t see in full is the one belonging to the sinister Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), who we ultimately get to know exclusively as the villain of the piece… but that wasn’t always the case.
Amid news about a Weapons prequel that first came out in August, there were reports that the 2025 blockbuster had originally included an Aunt Gladys-centric chapter, and I took the opportunity to inquire about it last month when I had the chance to conduct a virtual interview with writer/director Zach Cregger. Acknowledging the very specific structure of the movie, I asked how the cut chapter would have fit into the flow, and he explained that it would have been in the final act and followed the tale of young Alex – who becomes his aunt’s unwilling assistant as she searches for a magical cure to an unspecified condition. The filmmaker told me
It was gonna be after Alex’s chapter. We were gonna kind of do Alex’s chapter roughly as it was, and then kind of build him up to a climax where it was like, ‘Oh, it’s about to pop off,’ and then we were gonna do one more reset. And it was gonna be Gladys.
Zach Cregger didn’t get any more specific than that regarding the “reset,” but in rewatching the movie, my best bet would be that Aunt Gladys’ chapter would have begun right when Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) comes out of Alex’s house and beckons Justine and Archer (Josh Brolin) to enter. But that’s just a guess.
As for what we don’t end up seeing in the film, Zach Cregger told me that the story would have filled in the gaps regarding what brought Aunt Gladys to her “sister’s” house (on rewatch, one notes that her stated relation to the family changes). We would have apparently gotten a greater sense of both what was happening to her and why he made the decisions that she made. He continued:
We were gonna jump back in time a little bit and find her where she was before she came to the house, and get what was going on in her life, and get what brought her there and what kind of state she was in. And then that would bring us right up to where she gets picked up at the airport, and then we would go into our climax.
Because she doesn’t get her own chapter, Aunt Gladys doesn’t have as much dimensionality as a character compared to the rest of the ensemble in Weapons, and one is left wondering why it is that she feels justified in (presumably) sacrificing the lives of 17 children so that she can extend her own. It’s really an answer to that question that makes me most interested in seeing the aforementioned prequel get made.
As for Weapons as a singular movie, however, Zach Cregger decided during production that didn’t want audiences to be too exposed to the film’s main antagonist – understanding that keeping her as a mystery makes her much scarier. Or in his own words…
I took it out because, you know, it dulls her. To know more about her ruins her and Weapons. And so when I took it out, it just felt better and I was just like, ‘That was the right decision.’ You know? Let’s keep her vague.
Regarding the prequel, we’ll keep you up to date with news as updates come to light, but for now, fans everywhere can enjoy the glory of Weapons on home video. Following the film’s phenomenal run on the big screen this summer, it is now available for both purchase and rental digitally. And for those of you who are physical media collectors, the movie will be arriving on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD on October 14.