A Quiet Place, John Krasinski’s unsettling, low-key horror film, has been one of 2018’s best, creepiest surprises. But if things had shook out a little bit differently, it could’ve been a part of a major film franchise.
From A Quiet Place. Image: Paramount
According to a new interview with Slash Film, the screenplay, by writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, was at one point under consideration to be roped into the Cloverfield franchise.
Since the first film, JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot has had a curious method of expanding the series, adapting existing screenplays into a sort of genre-spanning horror monster anthology series, with great results and uh, not so great ones. And as explained by Beck and Woods, A Quiet Place could have been one of those movies:
Scott: I know! 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.
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.
At the end of the day, we’re grateful A Quiet Place got a chance to shine on its own. Original horror films are too rare these days as it is. And honestly, it’s probably best to avoid associating too closely with The Cloverfield Paradox.