By Drew Dietsch
| Published 6 minutes ago
Weapons continues to perform like gangbusters at the box office. In its third week in release, it has taken in $15.6 million at the box office. Technically, since Netflix doesn’t report their box office numbers, Weapons was actually the top performer as far as the matter of record. Even so, the original horror film from writer/director Zach Cregger is proving to be one of the year’s most powerful releases.
What is really surprising is just how well it is doing when compared to some other prominent releases from this year. The one that does make me kind of giddy is Snow White, one of Disney’s remakes of their classic animated canon. Weapons has already surpassed Snow White at the domestic box office and it’s well on its way to beating the Disney remake at the worldwide box office as well.
Why am I specifically comparing Weapons and Snow White. Well, I’ll get into it in the next section, but it is going to involve talking about the plot of Weapons. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I encourage you to do so because it’s very good (my review) but also because I’m going to spoil it for this article.
Original Takes On Classic Ideas
Snow White is a story about an evil witch who wants to be the fairest in the land. Weapons reveals itself to be a story about an evil witch who wants to cling on to her life. It’s very funny to me that such a similar plot element took center stage in two major movie releases this year, and they showed the value of originality over factory-processed products.
The idea of an evil witch obsessed with youth and vitality is a tale older than the hills themselves. And granted, it was expertly delivered in the original animated version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. However, the live-action remake did little or nothing to excite people about that kind of story being told again. Instead, it did the usual Disney remake things and ended up being discarded by audiences. There are any number of criticisms you can lob at Snow White (good faith and bad) but it’s clear that it did not offer a version of that story that audiences wanted to take a risk on.
But Weapons? Weapons made the risk part of its appeal.
Old Witch, New Witch
The mystery marketing of Weapons made its witch story part of a reveal. Thanks to that and just excellent writing form Zach Cregger, it gave audiences a witch story that felt new and exciting. Contrast that with Gal Gadot’s version of the Evil Queen and a story that felt old hat before it even hit the movie screen. It’s a no-brainer that Weapons was able to make a witch story that didn’t have people feeling like they’d seen it before, even though the basic motivations and machinations of Aunt Gladys are exactly the same as the Evil Queen’s.
It’s nice to see audiences respond positively to something as creative as Weapons and dismiss something as uninteresting and corporate as Snow White. I hope we continue to see audiences crave and support original riffs on classic story ideas instead of the usual “IP freely” slop.
