Did Jordan Peele Fire His Managers After Losing The Weapons Rights? Here's The Truth

Spoilers for "Weapons" to follow.

People have been buzzing about "Weapons," director Zach Cregger's follow-up to his 2022 horror hit "Barbarian," and if you've seen "Weapons," it's easy to see why. Put simply, this movie rips. The central concept isn't just part of the marketing, but the first thing you see and hear on the big screen: 17 children from the same class run into the darkness at 2:17 a.m., and nobody knows why. Cregger's script had the horror industry buzzing when a bidding war broke out back in 2023, after "Barbarian" proved to be an enormous hit — and according to a report in Deadline around that time, writer and director Jordan Peele was absolutely desperate to produce "Weapons." When he lost the bidding war, all hell broke loose in the Peele camp, if reports are to be believed.

So what happened? We may never know the full story, and as of this writing, both Peele and Cregger have largely evaded questions about the bidding war in interviews. In that initial Deadline report, though, the story goes like this. New Line Cinema, which is a subsidiary of Warner Bros., ultimately won the bid for "Weapons" with $38 million, which was $7 million more than Peele offered on behalf of his production company Monkeypaw Productions (a part of Universal Pictures). The report reads:

"One version goes that Peele was pissed, but we're also told that Peele was told that if he matched the New Line bid he would win the property but he and Universal were uneasy about the budget as a business proposition, and they walked away. New Line clearly felt otherwise, and its recent track record in genre grosses measured against budget has been as good or better than any studio in town."

In the aftermath, Peele fired two major members of his management team: Joel Zadak and Peter Principato, who work with Artists First and who also work with Cregger (Principato is Cregger's manager). The Deadline report clarifies that Peele is still represented by CAA but cut ties entirely with Artists First. If allegiances shifted behind the scenes as Peele tried to produce "Weapons," we may never get the full picture, but one thing seems clear: Peele wanted to help make this movie and was very unhappy to miss out on the opportunity.

Like I said, once you've seen "Weapons," you'll understand exactly why Jordan Peele took his bidding war loss so hard. Just as he did in "Barbarian," Zach Cregger manages to mix humor and comedy almost flawlessly. It's clear that he's an incredibly smart filmmaker, between the movie's stunning cinematography and its surprising restraint in certain aspects. 

I'll circle back to that restraint thing in a second, because what I'm about to say seems like it's diametrically opposed to that, but bear with me: "Weapons" has a huge scale compared to "Barbarian." Instead of putting focus on one Airbnb rental where everything goes horribly wrong, as he did in "Barbarian," Cregger widens his scope to an entire town, and he does so to great effect. Even with a larger scale, though, he wisely pulls back on things like the backstory of the film's antagonist, Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan, who should get an Oscar nomination for this film). If you're at all familiar with Peele's body of work, you can see the similarity here, in that his debut film "Get Out" was followed by "Us," which also operated on a much larger scale.

Frankly, it would have been awesome to see Peele join the team of "Weapons," because there's a ton of professional overlap between him and Cregger. Both notably got their start in sketch comedy — Peele in "Mad TV" and "Key & Peele" with Keegan-Michael Key, and Cregger in "The Whitest Kids U Know" — before turning their focus to making great horror movies. Both are known for high-concept work that's also deeply personal; Cregger has spoken extensively about how the death of his friend and fellow "Whitest Kids U Know" founder Trevor Moore influenced "Weapons," and Peele has acknowledged that his debut horror movie "Get Out" was his way of tackling racism he's dealt with throughout his life. Peele, who became the first Black screenwriter to win best original screenplay at the Oscars for "Get Out," walked so that Cregger could run, but again, those similarities can help explain why Peele wanted to be a part of "Weapons" so badly. And after the film's indisputably great opening weekend at the box office, there's no question in my mind that Peele is pissed all over again.

I'm not here to say that Zach Cregger or Jordan Peele only make movies in order to make a lot of money, but that certainly doesn't hurt, especially when you're able to make a relatively low-budget horror film that proves to studios that audiences crave original concepts and novel scares. "Weapons," following in the footsteps of another massively successful 2025 horror release, came out of the gate with a $71.3 million global opening weekend. That's an incredible haul, especially when you consider that the movie's budget was that aforementioned $38 offered up by New Line Cinema.

To add insult to Peele's perceived injury, this box office victory marks the sixth cinematic triumph for Warner Bros. in 2025, with "A Minecraft Movie," "Sinners," "Final Destination: Bloodlines," "F1: The Movie," and "Superman" all making beaucoup bucks at the box office throughout the year. Again, that's likely not front of mind for a creative guy like Peele. What might be front of mind, based entirely on my own conjecture, is that a horror hit like "Weapons" is a great sign of things to come. It hopefully indicates that innovative filmmakers like Cregger, as well as some of his horror contemporaries like Osgood Perkins and Ari Aster, might be handed blank checks to make whatever wild concepts they want in the future. I can't help but hope, though, that Cregger and Peele do get to collaborate one day ... and if they ever end up working on a project together, I'll be seated.

"Weapons" is in theaters now.