A Quiet Place Writers Considered Pitching Movie As A Cloverfield Sequel

A Quiet Place was almost a familiar place.

A big surprise sneaked up on the domestic box office this weekend as semi-silent horror film A Quiet Place came out of nowhere to a huge $50 million debut. It's a great place for A Quiet Place to be in, and according to the movie's writers, they never saw it coming. 

Filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote and shopped around A Quiet Place before writer-director John Krasinski came on board the project, have been expressing a lot of joy in interviews this last week regarding how quickly their movie came together once a couple of stars were attached. 

Before the husband-wife duo of Krasinski and Emily Blunt became part of the picture, the writers were willing to try everything they could to get the movie made — up to and including pitching the movie as a part of the Cloverfield universe in an effort to get it some traction.

The writing partners shared the tidbit during an interview with /Film, saying that for a time the two approached their script with the strategy of getting it in the hands of Bad Robot, tying it into the Paramount-distributed Cloverfield franchise before — somewhat surprisingly — executives at Paramount talked them out of it. 

"We were actually talking to an executive there about [A Quiet Place], and it felt from pitch form that there might be crossover," said Beck. "But when we finally took the final script in to Paramount, they saw it as a totally different movie."

According to Woods, the two are pretty happy that they didn't stick to that plan, and appreciate the fact that Paramount's executives weren't amenable to it. 

"One of our biggest fears was this getting swept up into some kind of franchise or repurposed for something like that," Woods said. "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."

"We feel grateful that Paramount embraced the movie as its own thing," Woods added.

Originally launched in 2008, the Cloverfield series is made up of otherwise-unrelated sci-fi and horror stories that are all connected by monsters, an oppressive mood, and some kind of space-time enigma. The third movie, released direct-to-Netflix following Super Bowl LII, was pretty terrible. A fourth, code-named Overlord, is due out in theaters on October 26.

Considering the massive success of their modest movie (as well as its overall high quality), it's definitely a good thing that the writers didn't end up having to reverse-engineer A Quiet Place as a Cloverfield sequel. What would they even have called it? A Clover Place? Because we would probably have gone with something like A Cloverfield, Covered with Sand, Because That's Quieter (To Walk On). 

A Quiet Place is out in theaters now.