A Quiet Place Might Have Been A Cloverfield Movie

Like last year's Get Out, the huge success of A Quiet Place this weekend has proved that modestly budgeted original horror movies can become box office juggernauts. The Jon Krasinski-directed film has had the second biggest opening weekend of 2018 so far, making more than Pacific Rim: Uprising or Ready Player One in its first three days (but less than Black Panther). Now the movie's writers have revealed that at one stage it was being considered to become part of the JJ Abrams-produced Cloverfield series.

In an interview with Slashfilm, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods explained that since both A Quiet Place and the Cloverfield movies were developed at Paramount, there were discussions about rewriting A Quiet Place to form part of that loose sci-fi series. "It crossed our mind and we had spoken to our representatives about that possibility," Beck said. "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."

Both 2016's 10 Cloverfield Lane and this year's The Cloverfield Paradox were initially shot as standalone movies, before being retitled and reshot to link them to the original 2008 movie Cloverfield. The fourth Cloverfield movie has reportedly been shot too. In January it was revealed that it was a World War II movie and had the working title Overlord, although no further details have been revealed to date.

In the Slashfilm interview, Woods went on to explain why it was important for original stories like A Quiet Place to be produced. "As filmgoers, we crave new and original ideas, and we feel like so much of what’s out there is IP," he said. "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."

As well as the huge box office results, A Quiet Place has received some of the year's best reviews too. In our A Quiet Place review, Tony Wilson said the movie "does its job well. It clearly establishes ground rules, continually ups the danger, and makes dynamic use of all types of sound. While it certainly doesn’t shy away from trying to make you jump, it’s the sonic nature of the scares and unending threat of everyday actions that make this film stand tall."