This article includes much speculation and probable bullshit. It is presented to you as something interesting to consider, and not being presented as anything more than a very vague half-rumor.
If you were one of the thousands of fans packed into the room for our Masters of the Web panel on Sunday at San Diego Comic Con, you caught some of IESB’s preview set footage from JJ Abrams ‘The Truth Is I Haven’t Come Up With A Name For This Fucking Thing’ movie. That footage is now up on IESB; while I don’t see all that much of interest in the footage, I did find the set report that goes along with it fascinating, as it lines up with some of the wacky stuff I heard during Comic Con weekend from a very trusted person.
IESB’s spy heard reports of monsters. That’s monster plus at least one, and that’s what I’ve heard. There is more than one monster running around in this film. The spy also saw people in biohazard suits, and speculated that there was a piece of monster or an infected human involved somehow. This also gibes with what I’ve heard from my source, which is… and I don’t know what to believe here… that Slusho turns people into monsters.
According to my source, who I trust, but who may have the information wrong (there’s lots of half heard things and semi-known facts floating around), there was a word floating around the production office, and that word was Rampage.
At first the CHUD team wondered if Cloverfield was actually an adaptation of the video game Rampage, but some checking around has convinced us that this is not the case. We’re now of the opinion that Rampage is the touchstone for the movie – multiple monsters, a soft-drink that turns people into beasts… well, if this is true and Midway wanted to sue, it sounds like they have a case.
Of course all of this could be (and probably is) wrong, wrong, wrong. We recently were fed some very incorrect JJ Abrams/Cloverfield related information that, had we run it, would have put lots of egg on our faces. I wonder if there are not foilers – fake rumors and spoilers – being seeded along with the online viral game. It would make some sense. Also, we have spoken to some people in the know who brush off any connection to Rampage at all, saying that the concept is as simple as it sounds: giant monsters destroying New York as seen through video cameras on the ground. The Blairzilla Project, if you will. Slusho will probably turn out to be barely in the film, glimpsed only on shirts and ads. All of that deep sea stuff on the Slusho.jp site probably only exists to give nerds some background, and the origin of the monster(s) probably won’t be mentioned in the film.
Here’s what makes me laugh about this whole thing: by the time the movie is two weeks from release, we’ll know everything, even if they don’t screen it. You can’t sell a film to the general public as a complete mystery, so the final ads and trailers will probably give away enough for nerds like me and you to piece everything together.