'Weapons' and 'Freakier Friday' show Hollywood can have it both ways

USA Today

17 hours ago

Trying to figure out what audiences want is one of the most overcomplicated issues facing Hollywood.
The best answer has always been the most inconvenient one to safety. It requires taking risks, a dedication to quality and a willingness to strike out every now and again in an effort to go for the home run. That can mean a new idea; that can mean going back to an idea you haven't created with in a while. It just means you've got to try.
Audiences want their money's worth. They want something fresh and new, but they also want something comfortable and fun. They want to be challenged, yes, but they also want to turn their brains off for just a bit after a stressful work week and just enjoy familiar confines.
They like the same thing, to be caught up with the trends, but they don't want too much of it. They're fickle, sure, but they're also consistent. They're willing to be surprised, willing to take a gamble one night on a movie with good word of mouth. However, they're also creatures of habit and often prefer to stick with what they know.
However, no matter what it is, they want it to be worth the price of admission. That's the universal unifier; that's the tie that binds. Generations of studio executives will rise and fall trying to solve the very question that any average moviegoer could answer while hanging out in the lobby, slurping on Diet Coke while waiting for the show to start.
They just want to watch a good movie. It could be Star Wars, it could be the rise of an exciting auteur with vision for years. One of those movies might make a lot more than the other, but franchise empires fall all the time over crumbling foundations. Audiences eventually wise up and stop showing up in droves when you keep shoveling them garbage. The most ardent fans may not care; the ones content with "more" over "worth." However, the causals will.
It's why the Weapons/Freakier Friday one-two punch at the domestic box office this past weekend matters a ton.
It's why the awesome Naked Gun reboot legging out matters and the latest Fantastic Four movie slipping does, too. It's why Sinners emerging as a word-of-mouth smash in the spring looms over the year, as does a Minecraft movie creating chaos (and lots of dollars) with Chicken Jockeys and a Smurfs movie bombing after getting terrible reviews.
It matters that Weapons is a sensational surge of broadly accessible horror-comedy from a director (Zach Cregger) whose audacious debut Barbarian blew past its economical budget and gathered moss over the years on streaming as people told all their friends to check out that wild movie with the creepy basement. It matters that the film's startling $70-plus million global opening haul came on the back of excellent reviews and, very likely, folks who saw the guy from Barbarian made this new movie that looks like nothing they'd quite seen before.
It also matters that an affable Freaky Friday update brought folks in, ones who saw the 2003 film with their parents when they were younger now possibly bringing their kids out to see the latest Disney body-swap comedy. It matters that Lindsay Lohan still holds cultural currency that extends past Netflix rom-coms, that legacy sequels don't have to be masterpieces to justify spending time in their worlds again. It matters that Freakier Friday was good enough to work, even if it wasn't great enough to usurp the beloved original.
In a broken Hollywood where the Marvel machine no longer churns out consistent hits like in the past, where studios attempt to mimic specific successes instead of forging their own paths and focusing on quality, the answer may really not be all that hard. Weapons is really well done; a bit polarizing like the best water cooler movies often are. Freakier Friday is a good hang; not a movie you think too hard about but one you enjoy with the whole family. The new Naked Gun is a hoot, a clever way to dust off intellectual property to reignite the fledgling comedic genre.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps was a piece of baked chicken, technically cooked to serve but lacking any distinct flavor or spice to keep the leftovers. It's too safe to stick with folks outside of the passionate Marvel fan base. People aren't telling their friends to see it. The film's dismal fall at the box office will still assuredly put its overall gross ahead of Weapons, Freakier Friday and The Naked Gun, but those films cost far less and will have a much easier time making a profit and sticking in the zeitgeist. The Fantastic Four has already withered on the cultural vine.
As much as we fret about the health of the theatrical experience when the superheroes falter, hitting doubles all over the film calendar, even in the oft-sleepy month of August, is far, far more advantageous than just risking it all on the same player hitting the same grand slam over and over again. Eventually, even the best sluggers age out.
As far as the viability of studio filmmaking goes, Weapons is the dream.
It's Cregger tapping fully into his Sam Raimi creepy-funny horror maestro potential. It's violent, unsettling, impossible to predict and downright jubilant in its desire to please. It's not fussily cerebral as much as it is shrewd with how it plots and disseminates information, paced like a hair-raising page-turner from Hell and explicit in a way that somehow doesn't alienate the most casual filmgoers. It's really hard to get movies like Weapons right without trying to consider how they'll play to a wider audience, but Cregger has the magic touch. He knows how to appeal without sacrificing his vision. He's cooking up an artisan dish that doesn't push picky eaters out of the restaurant. He's meeting widespread needs with originality.
Filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, Jordan Peele, Greta Gerwig and Ryan Coogler paved the recent path for a filmmaker like Cregger to come out, do his thing and thrive. They all took different paths to modern auteurism, with Nolan having been around for decades now and Gerwig just confirming her mainstream appeal with 2023's Barbie. It's the path Superman's James Gunn took to make signature superhero films that have survived the recent wave of fatigue.
They're not studio machines; they're filmmakers working at the heights of their powers who made movies that were new enough to build goodwill with audiences. People wanted to see more of what they had to offer. We mourn that directors aren't household names like they used to be, but Weapons will give Cregger a newfound credibility.
Coogler living up to his enormous potential with an original vampire movie this past spring in Sinners also gave him the year's most important financial success. Cregger blowing past expectations with Weapons builds on that momentum. Jason Blum confirmed the benefits of horror on a budget, but Peele, Coogler and Creggrer (and Ari Aster, to an extent) showed us why well-made event horror gets people out of the house in into the theaters.
This is the blueprint to keep original studio movies alive. Find directors with vision who still know how to make movies for everybody. It's not as hard as it looks; this entire generation was raised on Steven Spielberg, for goodness sake. Market the movies and directors. Watch people come out and tell all of their friends.
We don't need Sinners or Weapons sequels; we need more movies like Sinners and Weapons. Hopefully, Hollywood finally reinvests in big, fresh ideas from auteurs.
However, Hollywood also needs to better select its shots far better when it comes to nostalgia.
People get tired of watching the same-old thing over and over again, but nostalgia is always going to be part of the media ecosystem. As much as you cringe a bit at how nothing can ever stay dead in this day and age, you also accept the need for people to get the seconds they crave. Freakier Friday is a happy medium. Sure, it's not going to knock your socks off, but it's been a while since we've been in this mode to the point where more isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The concept is a bit shaky (more body-swapping, this time, with four people?!), but director Nisha Ganatra and writer Jordan Weiss make it work. You get Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis back to acting beyond their age, but you also get a sturdy story that is within the parameters of the original but just different enough to stand out. It's funny. It's got a good heart. It's just reverential enough without beating you over the head with callbacks to the original. It's about as well as this creative exercise could have gone, and it's probably going to have legs and be profitable.
These movies are not high art, but they occupy an important space at the multiplex. We live in the never-ending cycle of nostalgic pull; that's why they keep making Jurassic movies and Robert Downey Jr. is coming back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe to play a different character. Inherently, moviegoing audiences can't help themselves to return to the well if the water still tastes like it used to. Eventually, they'll tire out of one flavor... but another will do.
Hollywood needs to keep finding Freakier Fridays, too. No, they won't make any critic's top 10 list, but they scratch the shameless itch without insulting the audience's intelligence. If you can balance the old with the new in a way that doesn't disengage with quality, you can keep finding "Weapons and Freakier Friday" weekends. As badly as Hollywood wants another "Barbenheimer," these dual successes keep the lights on and keep the spirit of the form alive in ways that satisfy artistry and commerce. Isn't that the best-case scenario?
No longer do studios have to hold their breaths, banking on the same-old superhero movies to make a billion dollars. You need those types of movies, but you need the mid-range successes, too. They keep movies alive.
It's both good and scary for Hollywood for the Marvel machine to lose its regular mojo, where Spider-Man and Deadpool put butts in seats but the Thunderbolts and the Human Torch aren't working with the same fire. Eventually, the movie world was going to have to learn that investing in originality and vision can lead to positive results, and that these grossly expensive IP movies with little attention to detail just won't thrive on name alone.
Yes, you can do the whole "pander to nostalgia" thing, but mix it up a little and don't forget to make a decent movie in the process. It's really not that hard.
New franchises like Minecraft will form in the mountains, just as old franchises will gather dust for their inevitable nostalgic glow-ups down the road. The wheel in the sky keeps on turning. However, papering over shoddy storytelling with half-baked visual effects won't cut it in the long run. You have to spice things up.