Paramount ultimately saw it as its own project.

One day in the future, all movies will be “Cloverfield” movies. The ever-expanding universe, which most recently added “The Cloverfield Paradox” to its orbit, almost pulled another project into its gravitational field: John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place,” which was also made by Paramount. It ultimately avoided that fate, screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods reveal to /Film in a new interview, because the studio believed in it as a standalone film.

“I guess it crossed our mind and we had spoken to our representatives about that possibility,” Beck says. “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.”

“One of our biggest fears was this getting swept up into some kind of franchise or repurposed for something like that,” Woods adds. “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.”

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