A Quiet Place is currently garnering rave reviews and looks set to be a massively profitable hit for Paramount and star/director John Krasinski. But according to an interview with writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, the film could have ended up as part of the increasingly sprawling Cloverfield movie universe.
The aforementioned franchise has demonstrated a knack for absorbing pre-existing projects, with 10 Cloverfield Lane originally being an unrelated film called The Cellar that only needed minor reshoots to tie it in with the 2008 hit. Similarly, the recent Cloverfield Paradox was reworked from a movie titled The God Particle.
Anyways, here’s what Woods and Beck had to say:
Scott: That was one of those things that, I guess it crossed our mind and we had spoken to our representatives about that possibility. It was weird timing, though, because when we were writing the script, 10 Cloverfield Lane was at Paramount.
We were actually talking to an executive there about this film, and it felt from pitch form that there might be crossover, but when we finally took the final script in to Paramount, they saw it as a totally different movie. What was really incredible about the process that we feel very grateful for is the studio embraced this weird movie with no dialogue with open arms. They never thought about branding it as a Cloverfield film, I think in part because conceptually it was able to stand on its own.
Bryan: And our biggest fear was – we love Bad Robot, we love the people over there, and obviously J.J. [Abrams] is certainly a hero to us – but one of our biggest fears was this getting swept up into some kind of franchise or repurposed for something like that. The reason I say ‘biggest fear’ – we love the Cloverfield movies. They’re excellent. It’s just that as filmgoers, we crave new and original ideas.
Judging by the rapturous reception that’s greeted A Quiet Place, it looks as if it doesn’t need the additional leg-up of being another Cloverfield film in order to make a name for itself. Plus, like any major horror hit, Paramount will no doubt have an eye on turning it into its own money-spinning franchise, free of the expectations of having to fit in with any future Cloverfield continuity.
Having said that, we won’t have to wait that much longer for the next bit of action from the Cloverfield world. That’s because October 2018 will see the release of Overlord, which will be set during World War II and feature American GIs dealing with the results of a secret Nazi experiment into the paranormal – something J.J. Abrams has described as a “crazy movie.”
In the meantime, you should really check out A Quiet Place, which is now on wide release. You can read our review here, which concludes that it’s an expertly constructed slice of tense horror with a killer premise that it exploits to the fullest.