A Quiet Place, is one of the best (and creepiest) cinema experiences in 2018. It is an unsettling film that will have you wanting more, and goblins up every last scene. But John Krasinski’s horror film was almost part of something a lot bigger, the Cloverfield franchise.
In a new interview with Slash Film, screenwriters Bryan Woods and Scott Beck say that there was one point where their screenplay was under consideration for the Bad Robot franchise, but luckily that fell through. J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot takes existing screenplays and then twists them, adapting them to fit into the Cloverfield franchise. These films are hit-and-miss, so its nice to see that Paramount allowed A Quiet Place to stand on its own. According to Beck and Woods, it was a close call:
Image: Paramount Pictures
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.
Image: Paramount Pictures
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.
Image: Paramount Pictures
A Quiet Place is a great film that stands on its own. Wrapping it into the Cloverfield franchise would have taken away from the great original idea the film was, and blended it into a franchise that is a little all over the place. Original horror films are hard to come by these days. It is nice to see that there area few screenwriters capable of fresh new horror ideas.
