Don't be surprised by another Cloverfield sequel

Secure the head of the Statue of Liberty because the Cloverfield monster might be reemerging to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting spec script.

By Matt Schimkowitz | March 16, 2025 | 2:40pm

Courtesy of Netflix

Film News Cloverfield

Don't be surprised by another Cloverfield sequel

After 15 years of sideways sequels, John Goodman fakeouts, and a Netflix Paradox, the Cloverfield brain trust is looking to shock audiences with another sequel—this time, it might even be from an original script. Speaking to CountdownCityGeeks at South By Southwest this week and finally confirming a newswire reported by The A.V. Club in 2008, director Babak Anvari, who is promoting his latest film, Hallow Road, said he’s working on the project. However—and this should go without saying—”because everyone on that team is very secretive,” Anvari was “so sad” that he couldn’t say anything specific outside of “hopefully,” audiences are “gonna get something amazing.” Like Cloverfield monsters emerging from the depths of an unrelated spec script, hope springs eternal.

Unless this new one breaks the trend, the Cloverfield sequels were born from non-Cloverfield-related screenplays that abandoned the first film’s found-footage style and creatures. For 10 Cloverfield Lane, Paramount added a space invader ending to a script called The Cellar, a tense single-location thriller about a supposed alien attack revealed to be very real in the film’s final minutes. The second sequel, The Cloverfield Paradox, was based on a script called God Particle and was again rewritten to feature the franchise’s monsters. Yet audiences and critics rejected the Paradox, even though it included monsters from the Mile High Club (a club for monsters over 26,000 feet tall, pervs). There was even some talk about using A Quiet Place as an entryway into the series before it was determined that Quiet Place could stand its own four space-knuckled legs.