Zach Cregger is not done with the town of Maybrook. The director of the 2025 horror hit Weapons is developing a prequel centered on the film's unnerving antagonist, Aunt Gladys — the flame-haired eccentric played by Amy Madigan — and he has begun teasing just how unconventional his approach to her backstory will be. Working under the title Gladys, the project is set up at New Line Cinema, with Cregger directing and co-writing.
For fans of Weapons, the appeal is obvious. Madigan's Gladys emerged as the movie's breakout figure, and a film devoted entirely to her origins promises to explain the character who anchored its most disturbing moments. Cregger's comments suggest he intends to do that in a way that deliberately departs from the original's structure and tone.
An origin he'd been holding onto
By Cregger's account, the prequel is not a cash-in dreamed up after the fact. He has said the story was something he had essentially ready before Weapons was even released — a fleshed-out idea he kept in his back pocket, and material he had actually written focused on Gladys's past before cutting it from the finished film for length. In recent interviews he has stressed that the project is real and in motion, not merely a rumor.
What he has been most eager to convey is how different it will feel. "It's very different than Weapons, because we know who Gladys is now, and it's an interesting other chapter of her life that I really like," Cregger has said — framing the prequel less as a repeat of the first film's mystery-box construction and more as an exploration of a character whose menace is already established. That inversion, telling the story of a villain the audience has already met, is the crux of the "crazy" approach he has hinted at: a horror prequel built on familiarity rather than suspense about who its subject is.
The team and the timeline
Cregger is co-writing Gladys with Zach Shields, whose credits include Krampus and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Vertigo Entertainment's Roy Lee and Miri Yoon are producing. The prequel is expected to dig into how Gladys came to Maybrook in the first place — the events that shaped the character before the ones audiences witnessed in Weapons.
The wait, however, will be a long one. Gladys is currently slated to arrive in theaters on September 8, 2028, giving Cregger considerable runway to develop a follow-up to one of the more talked-about horror films of recent years. For now, he is content to tease the shape of it: a familiar face, an unfamiliar structure, and a chapter of Gladys's life he clearly can't wait to show.
