Every Major Cinematic Universe Ranked From Worst To Best

A pitch-perfect marketing campaign and novelty of the found-footage gimmick may have propelled Matt Reeves' Cloverfield to critical and commercial success back in 2008, but at no point over the next decade did it seem as though the movie would launch an entire cinematic universe.

In typical Bad Robot fashion, the expansion plans for the Cloververse were shrouded in mystery, even as the projects themselves were well underway. Taking a different approach to the shared mythology concept, the Cloverfield series has operated as more of an anthology, with each movie standing on its own merits despite taking place within the same continuity.

The original was a ground-level monster movie, 10 Cloverfield Lane was smaller and more psychological, the dumped-on-Netflix Paradox was an ambitious if ultimately misguided sci-fi and the upcoming Overlord is set against the backdrop of World War II.

Despite the most recent installment being a bit of a dud, the Cloverfield universe has every right to continue as it has so far provided relatively unknown filmmakers the opportunity to create low-budget genre films where they have a fair amount of creative control, a scenario that is becoming increasingly rare in modern Hollywood.