Last night, people seeing Michael Bay’s 13 Hours got a peek at something totally unexpected — a trailer for a movie called 10 Cloverfield Lane. Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, and John Gallagher Jr., the film looks like a low-budget contained thriller that’s somehow related enough to Cloverfield to bear its namesake. Check it out below.
This isn’t some bullshit announcement teaser released a year in advance — this is a genuine surprise. It was known that this movie was being made (it had been called The Cellar and Valencia), but nobody knew until last night that it was a Cloverfield-related project. And no one had any idea that we would get to see it in less than two months.
Two months. That’s fucking bananas. I have no idea how that’s enough time to market this kind of movie. Hell, it’s even getting an IMAX release (for two weeks before getting ousted by Batman v. Superman). I have some concerns that Paramount might be quietly dumping the film because they don’t like it, and the film’s apparent low-budget nature and minimal marketing means it won’t be some huge bomb. But I get the stronger sense that this is Bad Robot toying with its mystery box in a new way. Seeing Winstead and Goodman in the cast is a sign that the film has (or had) a decent script. This is supported by the fact that Whiplash writer/director Damien Chazelle has a writing credit after Matthew Stuecken and Josh Campbell. He seems like the kind of writer that would’ve been brought on to polish and rework the rougher bits on an earlier draft.
The film was directed by Dan Trachtenberg, who caught a lot of shit and side-eyes because his claim to fame was a Portal fanfilm that was actually pretty well made. So forget cynicism today. I’m excited for this. I kinda like Cloverfield (re-watching tonight to reaffirm that) and I kinda wanna like this when I see it on March 11.
UPDATE: I’m hearing that rumor mill churn, and the word now is that this may not be a sequel at all. Think Twilight Zone. That’s what I’m hearing. The film might not have anything to do with what happened in Cloverfield at all. What if Bad Robot has repurposed the Cloverfield brand into a kind of anthology series? That’s the word around the web right now.
