It’s been a great time to be a Pedro Pascal fan as of late. So far in 2023, not only did Disney+ subscribers get to see him back in action as The Mandalorian’s title character for its third season, he also finally appeared as Joel Miller in the HBO series The Last of Us, which will be returning for a second season. In the meantime though, Pascal is jumping from small screen scares to big screen horror, as he’s signed onto an upcoming horror movie being helmed by a hyped director.
Following the success of Barbarian, one of 2022’s best horror movies, director Zach Cregger is now putting together Weapons, for which he scored a big payday to make for New Line Cinema back in January. THR has now heard that Pedro Pascal has signed on to lead Weapons, though no details about who he’s playing were revealed. As with Barbarian, Cregger is both writing and directing this upcoming movie, which is described as “an interrelated, multistory horror epic that tonally is in the vein” of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.
This casting news follows a week after it was announced that Pascal signed on to Gladiator 2, joining a cast that includes Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, Connie Nielsen, Joseph Quinn and Denzel Washington. He’s also already shot the short film Strange Way of Life and the feature-length movies Drive-Away Dolls and Freaky Tales, with the former two being released later this year. Between those projects, The Last of Us Season 2 and reprising Din Djarin in either The Mandalorian Season 4 (Jon Favreau has already written the episodes, but it hasn’t officially been greenlit yet) or somewhere else in the Star Wars universe, Pascal is keeping his plate pretty full.
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Weapons is expected to begin filming this fall, so presumably he’ll work on that after he’s wrapped on Gladiator 2. Pascal has a little horror film experience under his belt from 2015’s Bloodsucking Bastards, but that was a comedy movie, so Weapons will give him the chance to show off his talents within the genre for something more dramatic and intense. His recent movie outings include Wonder Woman 1984, We Can Be Heroes, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and The Bubble.
As part of Zach Cregger’s deal to make Weapons for New Line Cinema, not only did the movie reportedly get a guaranteed greenlight and the assurance it will be theatrically release, the filmmaker will also get the final cut “pending a threshold is met during test screenings,” as well as “a controlling interest in a backend pot.” Furthermore, if Weapons is successful, then New Line would try to keep him around as a “significant horror voice and supplier.” Cregger will produce the project with Roy Lee from Vertigo, and J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules of BoulderLight Pictures, all of whom also worked on Barbarian, and Vertigo’s Miri Yoon is also attached as a producer.
Stay tuned to CinemaBlend for more explicit details on what Weapons holds in store, but if you missed out on seeing Pedro Pascal in The Last of Us Season 1, that can be easily remedied by streaming those episodes with an HBO Max subscription, which is also how you can watch Barbarian.
