A Quiet Place writers talk how it could have been a new Cloverfield film

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

A QUIET PLACE is in theaters now, and so far, it’s one of the most acclaimed movies of the year with enormous amounts of praise being placed on director John Krasinski. This is the kind of unique horror film audiences are craving, but there was a chance early in the process that things may have gone a different way. As the writers, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, talk about in a new interview there was a possibility this movie could have been a new entry in the CLOVERFIELD series.

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During an interview with /Film, the writers were asked if they took the movie to J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot (which is based at Paramount Pictures) with the idea that it could be a CLOVERFIELD film. The writers say that option was on the table, but that when Paramount eventually saw the final script they viewed it as its own beast.

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.

Woods continued, saying that although the CLOVERFIELD movies are great it’s best this movie was released on its own, especially in a world that is dominated by sequels and comic book movies.

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. 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.

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A QUIET PLACE is a movie about a family trying to live in silence so as to avoid the monsters outside that are attracted to sound. The CLOVERFIELD movies, a series of films that have different characters and plots but revolve around a similar event involving an alien/monster invasion, could have accommodated PLACE’s concept. It certainly would have redeemed the series, as the recent CLOVERFIELD PARADOX was shoveled to Netflix and was bombarded by critics.

PLACE would have been a thrilling, inspired entry in the CLOVERFIELD series, which has yet to focus on any sort of family trying to survive against the invasion of creatures. But, to Woods’ point, it’s better that we have original ideas like this coming into the marketplace and finding their own way, instead of becoming one part of a larger IP. If the pre-show box office is any indication, this movie will certainly be big, and entirely on its own merit.

A QUIET PLACE is in theaters now.