10 Recent Movie Castings That Had No Right To Be This Good
2. Almost The Entire Cast - Weapons
Sinners isn't the only film on this list to make 2025 one of the best for the horror genre in years. Zach Cregger's Weapons was nothing short of a creepy and unsettling triumph, something made arguably more impressive by its casting.
Boasting the likes of Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong, Austin Abrams, and more, you'd be forgiven for asking how exactly this fits into this list, but this was not the original cast. With the exception of Abrams, every major role had to be recast.
Thanks largely to the SAG-AFTRA strike of 2023, the cast's schedule meant that things had to change. Pedro Pascal, Renate Reinsve, Brian Tyree Henry, and Tom Burke were forced to drop out of the project and had to be recast. Though you could argue that version 2.0 was better, it is beyond reasonable that a film could go through such a tumultuous change and come out the other side better for it.
By all rights, such an undertaking could have and should have led to disaster, and instead, Weapons has its place alongside the likes of Sinners and The Long Walk as one of the best thrillers of the year. This may have been hard to predict based on what happened with the changes to almost every major on-screen personnel.