When the trailers first hit, many began speculating that director John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place was secretly the next installment in the disparate Cloverfield Universe. Mind you, J.J Abrams and his company Bad Robot were not at all attached to the film, but that didn’t stop fans from wondering aloud if there was perhaps a top secret connection.

In a world where *anything* can be a Cloverfield movie, it wasn’t exactly a stretch.

We now know that it’s absolutely not part of the universe, but writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods have revealed to /Film that it was something they at least considered.

“That was one of those things that, I guess it crossed our mind and we had spoken to our representatives about that possibility,” Beck explained. “It was weird timing, though, because when we were writing the script, 10 Cloverfield Lane was at Paramount. We were actually talking to an executive there about this film, and it felt from pitch form that there might be crossover; but when we finally took the final script in to Paramount, they saw it as a totally different movie. What was really incredible about the process that we feel very grateful for is the studio embraced this weird movie with no dialogue with open arms. They never thought about branding it as a Cloverfield film, I think in part because conceptually it was able to stand on its own.”

Woods added, “And our biggest fear was – we love Bad Robot, we love the people over there, and obviously J.J. [Abrams] is certainly a hero to us – but one of our biggest fears was this getting swept up into some kind of franchise or repurposed for something like that. The reason I say ‘biggest fear’ – we love the Cloverfield movies. They’re excellent. It’s just that as filmgoers, we crave new and original ideas. And we feel like so much of what’s out there is IP. It’s comic books, it’s remakes, it’s sequels. We show up to all of them, we enjoy those movies too, but our dream was always to drop something different into the marketplace, so we feel grateful that Paramount embraced the movie as its own thing.”

All worked out for the best on this one, we say.