“The Cloverfield Paradox” premiered on Netflix shortly after this year’s NFL Super Bowl. Netflix surprised people by dropping the film. What followed was a debate over the quality of the film itself along with the impact of such a launch on both cinema and the franchise’s future.
But, what will the future look like for the franchise now? The film’s producer J.J. Abrams was recently asked questions about the project on Facebook and how it came to be. He explains its genesis:
“Originally, it was written by Oren Uziel, who wrote a draft that was its own thing, and was around for a while…we started to think, ‘What are ways that this might fit into the world?’ But when we started shooting the movie, it was still something we were thinking about. Because the idea for the ‘Cloverfield’ series was not so much that it be this narrative throughline, but more that they be these really fun sort of thrill rides.
Like, if you imagine an amusement park, that’s a ‘Cloverfield’ amusement park, and every ride has a different purpose, but they all connect in some way or another. While we were shooting, we were making adjustments. This was a movie that went through many different iterations as it went along.”
About where the franchise will be going, Abrams says they are talking about a lot of different things at the moment but will not discuss it presently. “The Cloverfield Paradox” director Julius Onah was also involved in the Facebook Q&A panel. Onah explained:
It was a lot of lying, a lot of keeping secrets from even our own friends and family. It was a lot of fun. It’s so rare to kind of be able to just drop a movie on the whole planet.
DarkHorizons reported that at least one if not two more films in the series are already done. One is called “Overlord,” which is about a story of U.S. troops who infiltrate a Nazi base in WWII, only to find a supernatural Nazi experiment. Abrams called the project “crazy” but in a good way. Currently, the film is headed for a theatrical release on October 26th.
The other film was potentially revealed this past week by Bloody Disgusting with the original source saying the upcoming Bad Robot project “Kolma,” a Daisy Ridley-led remake of the 2003 Israeli TV movie “Kol Ma,” could well be a fifth “Cloverfield” movie.
The Cloverfield franchise was envisioned to be a series of lower-budget genre movies connected in a loose anthology style, but The Cloverfield Paradox budget would end up increasing to over $40 million after costly reshoots and attempts to connect it more overtly to the original 2008 Cloverfield.
In “The Cloverfield Paradox,” a crew aboard a space station finds itself alone after a scientific experiment causes the Earth to disappear. When a space shuttle appears, the space station’s crew must determine if it is carrying friends or foes.
The film stars David Oyelowo, John Ortiz, Elizabeth Debicki, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Chris O’Dowd, Ziyi Zhang and Daniel Bruhl. Directed by Julius Onah, the film was originally scripted by Freaks of Nature and 22 Jump Street scribe Oren Uziel. The project was rewritten by Star Trek Beyond‘s Doug Jung.
What did you think of The Cloverfield Paradox? What did you think they got right and wrong? Would you like to see more films from the Cloverfield franchise? Let us know in the comments section.
Photo Credit: Netflix