J.J. Abrams has done it again. No, this has nothing to do with Star Wars.

If you happened to see advance screenings of 13 Hours Thursday night, you saw a new trailer for a previously unknown film produced by Abrams. In these days when just about anything associated with a movie or trailer is written about online, keeping a project secret is rather impressive. (Although The Wrap’s Jeff Sneider mentioned on the Meet the Movie Press podcast Friday afternoon [40:45 mark] that the movie was previously sold with the working titles “The Cellar” and “Valencia.”)

Word quickly circulated about the preview, which was noteworthy because the word “Cloverfield” was in the title. The trailer for the film 10 Cloverfield Lane, which stars John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winnstead, was posted online early Friday morning.

But Abrams and his Bad Robot production company has done this before. Remember in 2007 when a surprising trailer ran in front of the first Transformers film? What looked like possibly a slice-of-life, romantic comedy about young New Yorkers kind of film turned out to be something very, very different.

The trailer didn’t even name the title of the movie. Was it a new Godzilla film? An alien attack flick? Some film geeks even speculated that this could be a Voltron movie, which sounded preposterous at the time and even more so now.

[SPOILER WARNING if you haven’t seen Cloverfield. But come on, it’s been eight years, man.]

If you had forgotten or never seen it, Cloverfield was a 2008 film about a giant monster attack on New York City told in the “found footage” style that became a popular trend among horror films. The footage, from a file named “Cloverfield,” was taken from the area “formerly known as Central Park.” Not only was the city the scene of a battle between the beast and the U.S. military, but the monster shed dozens of smaller parasite-like creatures that wreaked further havoc on the populace.

The movie looked to have relatively unknown talent behind it at the time, but those filmmakers turned out to have some serious star power. Drew Goddard just received an Oscar nomination for writing The Martian and was the main force behind Netflix’s Daredevil, while Matt Reeves has directed the past two films in the Planet of the Apes reboot. Things worked out pretty well for that Abrams kid too.

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The story ended on an unclear note, leaving viewers uncertain as to what happened. (Though it certainly didn’t look good for those holding the camera or anyone else nearby.) That ambiguous ending lent itself to plenty of speculation about a sequel. Eight years later, perhaps we finally have one.

No, we don’t know if 10 Cloverfield Lane is a sequel to Cloverfield. Maybe it’s a prequel. But that word is probably in the title for good reason, right? Otherwise, why even bother using it? Abrams told Collider that the movie is “a blood relative to Cloverfield,” whatever the hell that means. Maybe that says this isn’t a direct sequel, but kind of an anthology tale that takes place in the same world? (Or maybe the “Cloverfield” an anthology label, like “The Twilight Zone”?)

It’s very possible that most of the country, if not the world, is in pretty bad shape in light of the monster attack on New York City. Maybe other creatures came to join the original invader. Perhaps it will turn out that Goodman’s character is a paranoid guy who built that shelter in case of nuclear war, Y2K or some other such global emergency. But why is Winnstead’s character so eager to escape? Was she brought down there while the world was going to hell, maybe while unconscious? And what does she see through that window?

Directed by Dan Trachtenberg (making his feature film debut) with a script co-written by Damien Chazelle (Whiplash), 10 Cloverfield Lane is set for a March 11 release.

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[Slashfilm]

About Ian Casselberry

Ian is a writer, editor, and podcaster. You can find his work at Awful Announcing and The Comeback. He's written for Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports, MLive, Bleacher Report, and SB Nation.

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