10 Cloverfield Lane: 8 Reasons The Marketing Was Genius

4. The Cloverfield Explanation

How does Cloverfield connect to 10 Cloverfield Lane? Although all we've already discussed made the movie an intriguing prospect, that was the big thing that had everyone's imagination captured. There was no oblique narrative connection in the trailers, but they were stylistically mirrored (right down to both being first unveiled before a Michael Bay effort - Transformers for the original, 13 Hours for Lane) and J.J. Abrams even described them as blood relatives. Now, to show just how important this is, I should point out that the meaning behind Cloverfield as a name was always a bit odd. It was originally just a working title for the found footage monster movie, taken from a road near the Bad Robot offices, and only became the proper title after too many people online has referred to the project by that name. It was retroactively made the government given codename for the monster, but that still didn't get to the root of any in-universe origins. What 10 Cloverfield Lane does, then, is provide further definition of what the title actually means. Audiences my be asking "Why is the follow-up to a found footage kaiju feature a claustrophobic hostage thriller?" for narrative reasons, but it goes beyond being the same as figuring out how Guradians Of The Galaxy fits into The Avengers; there's something about the very fabric of the franchise at play here. The logistics of that connection are big enough for an article in itself (keep your eyes peeled for that) and, in the interest of keeping spoilers to a minimum, I'm not going to elaborate on what's going on here, but suffice to say the movie brought you into a franchise film without knowing what the franchise actually is. And that brings us to the other key facet of the titling...