10 Cloverfield Lane is JJ Abrams best kept secret
10 Cloverfield Lane is JJ Abrams best kept secret
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Twitter lit up last night around midnight on the East Coast with talk of Cloverfield 2. It didn’t take long for it to start trending, but a quick Google search at that time didn’t net much other than pings of a random title that reads more like an address in Santa Monica, 10 Cloverfield Lane. What did it all mean
It wasn’t long until speculation that a sequel to the 2008 horror was being created. First there were tweets from moviegoers at the first screenings of Michael Bay’s new Benghazi-pic 13 Hours, and then the confirmation came by way of shaky cellphone video from those moviegoers
The teaser starts out like any slice of life film: a family playing with the old jukebox, playing games, playing with puzzles, playing at making house. Because it’s all a nasty facade. You realize this is not a beautiful house, they are in a fallout shelter. And this is not someone’s beautiful wife, she is a prisoner. And at her first chance to escape, well. The beauty of anything with the name Cloverfield in it (or not, just a date) is we don’t know what happens next
The title screen pops up, 10 Cloverfield Lane. Followed by the writers (Josh Campbell and Matthew Stuecken) and director (Dan Trachtenberg). Then the release date appears: 3-11-16
How could a movie that had so much hype surrounding it the first time, with loyal fans dying for a sequel, suddenly drop out of nowhere and is coming out in less than two months? That means the thing has been filmed in near secret this whole time
While that seems impossible, a quick IMDB check of the director’s name, Dan Trachtenberg, reveals he has one film coming out this year, really the only feature film to his name: Valencia. According to IMDB (which as of 11PM PST, the title has been updated to 10 Cloverfield Lane), the plot is about a young woman who wakes up from a car accident and finds herself trapped in the basement of a man who claims he saved her, after a chemical attack has left the world outside uninhabitable. And go figure, Valencia/10 Cloverfield Lane stars Mary Elizabeth Winsted, John Goodman, and John Gallagher Jr, all of whom we see in that trailer
Why call it Valencia to start with, though? Originally, Cloverfield was just the working title for the film, a title that wasn’t even the original code name for it. It was supposed to be Cloverdale, but writer Drew Goddard heard it as “Cloverfield,” a street in Santa Monica where Abrams worked off of at the time, and it just sort of stuck all the way to the actual title of the film. Movies use working titles all the time to keep rabid fans off their trail — sometimes they are successful
Putting on a director and writers with no ties to the original goes a long way in helping keep a project like this under wraps. Abrams wanted this to be Hollywood’s best kept secret and he pulled it off as seamlessly as he did reinvigorating Star Wars
