EXCLUSIVE: Following the smash hit success of the John Krasinski-directed A Quiet Place, it perhaps wasn’t surprising when Paramount Pictures chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos announced a sequel at CinemaCon. But ahead of that news, Krasinski told Deadline he hadn’t expected such a response to his first horror film.

“It’s only a short while since the movie came out,” he said, “but already people are saying, ‘We want to live in this world more,’ which is really interesting. I’m surprised people aren’t like, ‘Nah, we know what this is, and we just want to leave it as it is.’ ”

He added that the horror story of a family living in silence, hiding from noise-sensitive alien creatures had originally seemed like a stand-alone piece.

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“To be perfectly honest, it was never really on my mind while we were making it,” he said. “I never really thought of it as an expanded world; I always thought of it as a one-off.”

Although Krasinski has not yet confirmed he will helm the next installment, he did touch on what he would like a sequel to explore. “The thing that I loved in the movie,” he said, “where my mind kept wandering as we were making it, was the question of who was on the other end of those fires, when the father lights the fire and in the distance those other fires light up. How did those people survive? How did that old man survive?”

“In the extreme these characters are going through, there’s no room to think about that. They’re there, there’s an old man who’s about to scream, they just have to deal with that. I think it would be interesting to see what’s going on elsewhere at this same time.”

In announcing the sequel at CinemaCon, Gianopulos praised Krasinski and his co-star and wife Emily Blunt, saying, “It’s the artist with a true vision that makes the improbable happen.”

Gianopulos also said that following the studio’s box office disappointment, “We’re laying the foundation for the success that Paramount had in the past and I’m incredibly confident that we have the right team, culture, and attitude in place to take Paramount to new heights. And we already started on that road to giant success with A Quiet Place.”