Weapons: The movie originally had a different ending, here's why it was changed

Weapons is one of those movies that doesn’t try to scare you with loud noises or cheap thrills. Instead, it creeps into your head and sits there. It replays the moments you wish you could unsee. It is a horror story about strange happenings in a small town. And it also has a kind of dread that will simply refuse to leave you even after it is over.

Seventeen children vanish without a trace in the dead of night. The next morning when school reopens, their seats sit eerily empty. Except for one boy. He is the sole student left in the classroom. Rumors ripple through the town and suspicion quickly turns toward the teacher. But the truth is stranger and even darker.

The children have been taken by a witch. And only at the story’s end is her secret revealed. Weapons is even more interesting because of its layers and the use of the supernatural. It is about control, fear, and power. It shows how far someone can go to protect the people they love, even if it means helping the very thing that’s destroying them.

Weapons: Director Zach Cregger had a very different ending in mind

Director Zach Cregger is no stranger to leaving audiences guessing. Much of Weapons plays in the shadows. The events happen without any explanations. Viewers are left to decide whether they’re looking at an allegory or just a chain of events with no deeper meaning. Cregger himself has not revealed much about the layers in Weapons. He has avoided giving definitive answers in interviews, likely because the film is still fresh in theaters. Or maybe because he genuinely prefers to leave the canvas messy and open to interpretation.

But one thing he has revealed is that the ending of Weapons wasn’t what he originally planned. In an interview with Inverse, Cregger explained that the theatrical ending was shaped by test screenings. In the released version, the film closes with a voiceover of a young narrator who we hear earlier in the movie. He returns to explain what happened. Alex’s parents are sent to a facility, he’s placed with a kinder aunt, and the children freed from Gladys’ spell take months, some even over a year, to speak again. It gives closure, but it wasn’t Cregger’s first choice. He wanted to end it on Josh Brolin's character, Archer's son's face.

"Originally, that voiceover that comes in at the end wasn’t even in there. I was not really into that idea. I wanted to just end it on [Matthew’s] look. But people were not stoked on that. There was no voiceover, and we just ended on the kid’s face. The lights went out and ‘Written and directed by Zach Cregger’ came up, and a woman in the theater goes, ‘What the f*ck?’"

That wordless ending might have been more haunting, but the test audience wanted answers or at least more guidance. Still, even with the voiceover, Weapons doesn’t give us happy endings. The children may have slowly regained speech, but the trauma is still there. Alex will probably never live with his parents again. Justin’s life has been scarred in ways we will never know. And for all of them, what happened under Gladys’ spell in Weapons is something they’ll carry forever.