How Close Was A Quiet Place To Being Another Cloverfield Movie?
A Quiet Cloverfield Place? A Cloverfield Place? A Quietfield?
There'll be a point in the future where everything is Cloverfield movie. The MCU will be a Cloverfield offshoot. Adam Sandler's new movie will be a Cloverfield movie. Your breakfast will be a Cloverfield movie. This article is a Cloverfield movie.
So it should come as no surprise that we now know of ANOTHER movie that almost joined JJ Abrams' tenuous and confusing shared universe. According to A Quiet Place's writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (who spoke to /Film) the speculation about the silent horror movie being part of the franchise that sprung forth when the first trailer arrived were almost entirely on the money.
Here's what Beck had to say:
“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.”
Woods added:
“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. And we feel like so much of what’s out there is IP. It’s comic books, it’s remakes, it’s sequels. We show up to all of them, we enjoy those movies too, but our dream was always to drop something different into the marketplace, so we feel grateful that Paramount embraced the movie as its own thing.”
Now that they're looking towards more A Quiet Place movies as a franchise, that's definitely worked out for the best.
It's a shame that the Cloverfield franchise is already being talked of in reductive terms, but that was always inevitable when The Cloverfield Paradox was so cynically dumped into the universe to rescue a disappointing movie.
Hopefully, the innovative marketing strategies those films have used will be matched by the substance of future releases, because it would be a shame for the experiment not to be a positive one in the long-term. Still, this was definitely the right decision for John Krasinski's excellent little movie.