Since the bizarre negotiations, marketing, and anticlimactic release of The Cloverfield Paradox, every upcoming sci-fi flick is Schrödinger’s Cloverfield Movie. We know of at least one more that’s coming out this year — Overlord, a World War II-set soldiers-vs-monsters thriller — but given the franchise’s penchant for snapping up scripts and secretly putting Cloverfield aliens into them, any film could become part of the series. Even, almost, A Quiet Place.

While talking to /Film, the writers of John Krasinski’s new sci-fi horror movie, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, mentioned that they had thought about allowing it to be included in the Cloverfield universe. Beck said:

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.

It would have been pretty easy, actually, to do it. The creatures in A Quiet Place could have become Cloverfield aliens, and all they’d really need to do is change the title and put the word “Cloverfield” in a couple places, like in one of the headlines of those newspapers Krasinski has hanging up in his basement lab. Woods said that, ultimately, they were glad that Paramount decided to let A Quiet Place stand on its own:

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.

A Quiet Place is now playing.

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