| How to entertain yourself this weekend. |
The real Weapons were the friends we made along the way. —Alex Pappademas, culture editor |
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It’s Friday and all anybody wants to talk about is Weapons, which hits theaters today after months of anticipation stoked by a laudably low-information prerelease marketing campaign. Aside from Reddit power users who downloaded the script when it leaked a few months back, everybody going into Zach Cregger’s followup to 2018’s Barbarian this weekend is going into it more or less totally cold, knowing only that this is a movie about what happens after a bunch of kids all wake up at 2:17 in the morning, spontaneously Naruto-run out into the darkness, and disappear.
This is noteworthy because it’s not really how things work anymore; by the time anything comes out, we generally know way too much about it. The late Roger Ebert once said that modern movie trailers are like those sample-size cubes of cheese they give out at the supermarket, because they tell you everything there is to know about the cheese except what it’s like to eat a pound of it. But between overzealous take-no-chances movie marketing, social media that caters to the most perversely spoiler-hungry cohort of the audience for clicks, and the movie business’s overreliance on the slavish recapitulation of well-thumbed IP, it’s tougher than ever out there for anybody who likes to be surprised at the movies. We’ve known for a solid year that Robert Downey Jr. is returning to the MCU to play Dr. Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, a movie that does not come out until next Christmas; in March, Marvel announced the approximately 382 cast members who’d be joining him. And sure, there may be twists and reveals yet to come—but imagine a world in which we just, y’know, didn’t know any of that stuff until the movie came out?
The Weapons marketing dared to bet on people’s curiosity—and their interest in finding out what Cregger had up his sleeve—being enough to open a movie on; as somebody who’s edited a couple of Weapons pieces over the last few months and has corresponded with Warner Bros. about the movie, I can say (without spoiling anything) that the studio took the whole spoiler thing extremely seriously, and sent out emails (politely) requesting a cone of silence on prerelease coverage of teensy story points whose significance I couldn’t even immediately recall despite having screened the film early. There’s not a “Darth Vader is [redacted]’s father” or “[redacted] was actually dead the whole time”-level twist to reveal in Weapons, but there’s something laudable about the studio seeking this level of opsec on the overall experience; when I saw the movie I was reacting to it organically, not comparing it to what the buzz had led me to believe I was in for. More of this, please.
With that in mind: While Sam McPheeters’ recent GQ profile of Cregger gets into the personal tragedy that prompted Cregger to start writing the script that became Weapons (namely, the accidental, nonsensical death—four years ago this week—of Trevor Moore, who’d come up alongside Cregger in the sketch-comedy group The Whitest Kids U’Know) and what it was like to watch the film being shot in Atlanta last summer, you can read it without learning anything surprise-ruiningly specific about Weapons itself. The same is true of this piece on Alden Ehrenreich, unless you consider it a spoiler that Alden Ehrenreich is in this movie playing a cop with a positively resplendent mustache.
Weapons! It’s great! But people are seeing it right now, which means the information environment is about to get treacherous. Go while you can still go in cold—and, LOL, come on back to GQ.com on Monday morning, when we promise to discuss this movie’s totally bonkers ending in incredibly spoilerific detail, because that’s how the game is played. —AP
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