Paramount and J J Abrams is looking to resurrect the Cloverfield franchise and have just hired a writer to do so.
Joe Barton, who is also showrunning Warner Brothers’s The Batman Gotham City police force spinoff series for HBO Max, has been hired to write a new installment in the science-fiction monster franchise, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Will it be a direct sequel to the original film or something just loosely connected thematically? Given the veils of secrecy around previous franchise installments don’t expect to hear news of that sort for a while. The Hollywood Reporter does say that unlike the original, this new film will not be a found footage style film.
The original Cloverfield, which depicted a group of twenty-somethings trying to flee Manhattan in the midst of a giant monster attack, captured the public’s imagination with its allegorical retelling of the 9/11 terror attacks. Made on a small budget of just $25 million, the film ultimately grossed $172 million worldwide. That box office was driven in part by a marketing campaign that gave people small mysteries relating to the film to solve.
The film spawned two sequels – 10 Cloverfield Lane and The Cloverfield Paradox. Both films were originally developed as their own unique projects with the studio folding them under the Cloverfield moniker simply because they shared some science-fiction and horror tropes. 10 Cloverfield Lane started life as a screenplay titled The Cellar and went into production under the title Veranda. The Cloverfield Paradox originally started life as the science-fiction horror story The God Particle, but got slapped with the Cloverfield tag and a few reshoots to reinforce that when Paramount realized that they may have had a dud on their hands. They quietly sold the film to Netflix, who surprise premiered it right after the 2018 Super Bowl. It was a move that generated a brief burst of excitement for the film, until everyone saw it and realized how bad it actually was.
With the failure of The Cloverfield Paradox, it seemed as if the franchise was going on hiatus for while. At least until someone came along with a good enough idea to excite Abrams and Paramount about a new film. And apparently that someone is Joe Barton.
