10 Years of Cloverfield: Part Two
By Jay Truant
I love monster movies. When I was a wee prehumous lad, my dad spent many weekend afternoons introducing me to classic monster movies such as Toho’s Godzilla series, King Kong, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Them! and many more. My fascination with giant city-destroying monsters developed quickly and would follow me into adulthood – so when I saw the first teaser trailer for the JJ Abrams-produced found footage monster flick Cloverfield, I was all in. I followed the movie’s Alternate Reality Game (ARG), bought a Slusho t-shirt and even took the day off of work to catch the earliest showing of the film on 1-18-08. I was excited by Abrams’ desire to make the Cloverfield monster America’s equivalent of Japan’s Godzilla, and patiently awaited further sequels. As it would turn out, it would be nearly a decade before a sequel arrived in theaters – and once it had, it completely defied any and every expectation that fans had for it.
Cloverfield was a huge success for Paramount Pictures and producer JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions. On a production budget of $25 million, the film quickly turned a profit during its opening weekend, debuting in 3,411 theaters with a final weekend gross of $40 million. Rumors that Paramount were eager to push a sequel into development were the talk of the Internet that Monday morning, and director Matt Reeves addressed the possibility of a follow-up in an interview with Coming Soon:
There’s a moment on the Brooklyn Bridge, and there was a guy filming something on the side of the bridge, and Hud sees him filming and he turns over and he sees the ship that’s been capsized and sees the headless Statue of Liberty, and then he turns back and this guy’s briefly filming him. In my mind that was two movies intersecting for a brief moment, and I thought there was something interesting in the idea that this incident happened and there are so many different points of view, and there are several different movies at least happening that evening and we just saw one piece of another.
Over the next eight years, Reeves and Abrams would discuss the sequel in interviews, despite Abrams’ confirmation of the monster’s death at the end of the original film in an interview with Rolling Stone. In January 2016, Cloverfield fans would have their patience rewarded when a surprise trailer for 10 Cloverfield Lane debuted ahead of Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.
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