A Quiet Place has finally debuted in theatres and, thankfully, thus far it has been quite well-received.
In a recent interview with Slashfilm, Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, the film's writers revealed that they briefly toyed with the idea of making the film a part of the Cloverfield franchise. While the film's monsters and unique concept would certainly make it at home with some of the earlier Cloverfield installments, the pair ultimately decided against it. As Beck explains:
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.
Over the past couple of years, Paramount has turned the Cloverfield franchise into a unique experiment, connecting previously unconnected scripts. So far, the franchise consists of Cloverfield, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and most recently, The Cloverfield Paradox, which made a major debut on Netflix earlier this year.
It seems like A Quiet Place was, at one point, in a similar sort of situation. Before its release, fans of the Cloverfield franchise even began to theorize about the film being connected - Turns out there was something to that speculation after all.
Woods adds another factor which influenced the pair's decision to keep the film as its own seperate entity:
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.
What do you think about A Quiet Place almost being in the Cloverfield franchise?