Jennifer Lawrence To Star In Zach Cregger's The Flood

Warner Bros. and New Line have set an August 2028 release for the untitled sci-fi project, reuniting Cregger with the studio that backed his Oscar-winning Weapons.

Jennifer Lawrence has signed on to star in Zach Cregger's next film, a sci-fi thriller called The Flood, and Warner Bros. Has already locked in a release date. Mark August 11, 2028, on the calendar.

Cregger writes, directs and produces, working again with Warner Bros. And New Line after Weapons turned into one of last year's genuine surprises. That film cost less than $40 million and pulled in $270 million worldwide, and it also handed Amy Madigan a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing the unhinged Aunt Gladys who spirits away an entire classroom of kids while the adults around them fail to notice a thing. Before that came Barbarian in 2022, the breakout that put Cregger on every studio's list.

Details on The Flood's story are being kept close, but JoBlo reports the film unfolds in space, and Cregger himself has said it isn't strictly a horror film even though it carries horror sequences. In comments shared with the outlet, he described it as another film with an unconventional structure, though this one won't jump between perspectives the way Weapons and Barbarian did. "It's disturbing, but it's not a horror movie," he said, adding that the project feels intimidating to make and that he isn't entirely sure yet how he's going to pull it off. He's pointed to 2001: A Space Odyssey as a touchstone, careful to add he isn't putting his own film in that company, just noting a shared strangeness that he thinks both movies share.

Cregger called Lawrence one of a kind in a statement, and Warner Bros. Co-chairs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy went further, calling her one of the most gifted actors working today and framing the reunion with Cregger as an extension of what worked on Weapons. Amblin Entertainment is producing alongside Roy Lee and Miri Yoon of Vertigo Entertainment, the same Vertigo shop behind Cregger's last two films.

For Lawrence, this lands in the middle of a stacked run. She's got Die My Love with Robert Pattinson, the rom-com No Hard Feelings and A24's Causeway behind her, plus Martin Scorsese's What Happens at Night and the Hunger Games prequel Sunrise on the Reaping still to come. An Oscar winner for Silver Linings Playbook and the face that carried the Hunger Games franchise for a decade, she's not exactly hurting for genre credibility, though her last trip off-planet was Passengers, a film nobody's rushing to defend.

No other cast has been announced, and Warner Bros. Hasn't said when shooting starts. What's clear is that Cregger has earned enough goodwill off two back-to-back hits to get a bigger budget and a bigger star, and now it's a question of whether The Flood can do what Weapons did: turn a strange, hard-to-explain premise into something audiences actually show up for in 2028.