Prequel Will Get Wild With Gladys’s Origin, Says Weapons Director
In a new interview, Zach Cregger outlined his horror slate, turning Weapons toward a prequel and detailing his take on Resident Evil — with specifics still under wraps.
Onstage at San Diego Comic-Con’s Collider “Directors on Directing” panel, Zach Cregger said he’s already deep into a prequel centered on Aunt Gladys — the breakout menace from Weapons. The project, in development at New Line, is moving under the working title Gladys, with Cregger co-writing the screenplay alongside Zach Shields.
“I’m really excited about the Gladys movie, and I loved working with Amy,”
Cregger told the crowd that Gladys’s unnerving power in Weapons came from how little the film explained her, but he sees room to dig into the character without killing the mystique. He also stressed this isn’t a quick cash-in and that the script is being taken seriously.
“It ’s got a lot of twists and turns and mysteries and crazy things, like Weapons does,”
he said, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
- Working title — Gladys
- Writers — Zach Cregger and Zach Shields
- Studio — New Line Cinema
- Status — script in progress
Cregger’s Resident Evil pivot
While Gladys takes shape, Cregger is also steering a new Resident Evil movie hard toward survival horror rather than a beat-for-beat game adaptation. After early backlash to the first teaser for looking too generic, he defended the approach, saying the goal isn’t fan-service recreations but a relentless, on-the-ground nightmare.
The film centers on Austin Abrams as Bryan, a biomedical courier whose routine delivery implodes once the outbreak erupts. Early reactions have called out the atmosphere and creature design, which the movie leans on to keep the focus tight and scary.
Instead of franchise veterans leading the way, Cregger drops an ordinary guy into the chaos and lets the world collapse around him — Abrams plays Bryan as the lone courier caught in the first wave.