‘A Quiet Place’ Was Almost Part of a Very Different Horror Monster Franchise

The Big Picture

• A Quiet Place and Cloverfield share a history, with 2018’s
  A Quiet Place
  initially planned as part of the Cloverfield universe.
• A Quiet Place
  succeeded with its sound-hunting monster concept and character development.
• A Quiet Place
  was followed up by a sequel,
  A Quiet Place Part II
  , and a prequel,
  A Quiet Place: Day One
  .

What if I told you that two of the best creature features of this century have a shared history? 2008’s Cloverfield introduced the world to Matt Reeves and flipped the radically popular found footage subgenre on its (decapitated) head by incorporating its use in a creature feature disaster film. A decade later, in 2018, John Krasinski got to show everyone that he was more than the guy from The Office when he helmed A Quiet Place, another alien invasion movie, one done without the found footage trick, but whose success started with its concept of monsters who hunt their prey by sound. It’s easy to see the similarities, but those almost became much more pronounced because when A Quiet Place started out as a script by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, it was envisioned as another entry in the Cloverfield universe.

The ‘Cloverfield’ Universe Has Resulted in Three Films So Far

Cloverfield started as an idea from J.J. Abrams, who wanted to create the American version of Godzilla. Abrams had achieved success in the mid-2000s thanks to creating Lost in 2004 and directing Mission: Impossible III in 2006. His production company, Bad Robot, was the force bringing Cloverfield to life, with veteran TV writer, Drew Goddard, who’d penned episodes of Lost and Alias being brought in to write the script. Abrams wouldn’t direct but turned to Matt Reeves to put the vision on screen. Reeves might be a huge name in Hollywood now thanks to a couple of Planet of the Apes movies and The Batman, but in 2008, his lone feature film directing credit was for 1996’s romantic comedy The Pallbearer. That’s not exactly a great precursor to making a monster movie, but it worked. Cloverfield was a giant success, making $172 million worldwide on a $25 million budget. With that kind of haul, it wouldn’t be the end of the Cloverfield name.

The easiest route would be to simply make a Cloverfield 2 with the monster wrecking another city, but instead, the decision was made to create an expanded Cloverfield universe. This led to the equally great 10 Cloverfield Lane in 2016, which went from the wide scope of New York City to the confinement of an underground bunker. That was followed up by the sadly disappointing and quickly forgotten The Cloverfield Paradox. In January 2021 came the exclusive news from The Hollywood Reporter that a new Cloverfield project was being worked on and would be a direct sequel to the original. While we wait to see how that plays out, there was almost another film in the Cloverfield world that ended up being bigger than anything ever done in that trilogy.

The Writers of ‘A Quiet Place’ Took the Project to Paramount as a ‘Cloverfield’ Movie

Many might give all the credit for A Quiet Place to John Krasinksi, who came in late and helped work on a draft of the script and made some important changes to the alien monsters, which first looked like Transformers fixed with rhinos — but the film didn’t start with him. A Quiet Place was the brainchild of writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. In a 2018 interview with Slash Film, the duo spoke about how they wanted to make a horror movie where sound was the equivalent of the shark in Jaws. They also wanted to find a way to make a modern-day silent film. Put those two ideas together and boom, you have the building blocks for A Quiet Place. Beck and Woods revealed that, while writing their script, they thought that the best idea was to pitch it as big as possible. Scott Beck admitted that they spoke to a Paramount executive about doing a Cloverfield crossover with their story, but that all changed once the script was written and Paramount got a look at it. The studio was so impressed that they wanted A Quiet Place to stand on its own.

Keeping It Separate Made ‘A Quiet Place’ Even Better Than ‘Cloverfield’

Unfortunately, it’s not often that you hear that a big Hollywood studio had the right idea for a movie, which involved risking the loss of money for the potential of something bigger. Having A Quiet Placebe part of the Cloverfield universe would have been an easy and understandable choice that would have made for a guaranteed hit. Just that hook makes for a big opening weekend. Instead, Paramount went for a gamble that paid off in a big way. Bryan Woods told Slash Film that while they pitched A Quiet Place as a Cloverfield movie, they were afraid their original idea would get lost in a bigger franchise. He said, “Our dream was always to drop something different into the marketplace, so we feel grateful that Paramount embraced the movie as its own thing.”

A major reason A Quiet Place works on its own is John Krasinski coming in as director. He wasn’t a Michael Bay, making big, explosive action movies, but a guy who made small character pieces such as The Hollars. For him to go from that to an alien invasion sci-fi horror film might seem strange, but it makes sense because the film is not about the aliens themselves, but the family trying to survive. Getting to know them and what they’re going through is just as important as the monsters’ carnage. A Quiet Place is about grief, as they mourn the loss of their young child, contrasted with the promise of new life and hope because Emily Blunt‘s Evelyn Abbott is about to give birth to a baby who will change the family’s life, while also making their safety that much more compromised. It’s also a film about a father and his daughter, with the deaf Regan (Millicent Simmonds) thinking her father, Lee (Krasinski), doesn’t love her anymore as she feels responsible for her younger brother’s death. It’s because we care so much about these people and don’t want them to die that makes the monster storyline so exhilarating. And the actors had to convey all of this mostly without dialogue.

That, of course, was A Quiet Place‘s biggest selling point. If you make a noise, you die. Making A Quiet Place as a spinoff of Cloverfield might have worked in the short term to get attention, but it also would have boxed it in with its own rules and expectations. It wouldn’t have been about the interesting premise and the characters, but trying to link it to what came before. Audiences would have missed out on the originality while they were busy trying to connect the present to the past. Thankfully, A Quiet Place got to be its own shocking beast. It made a stunning $340 million worldwide on a minuscule $17 million budget, launching a franchise of its own that’s set to be continued with A Quiet Place: Day One which invades theaters this week.

A Quiet Place is available to watch on Prime Video.

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