A Quiet Place: Day One Trailer Looks Like the Cloverfield Sequel We Never Got

New Yorkers minding their own business when aliens attack from the sky? That sounds like a Cloverfield! Well, the first Cloverfield from 2008, anyway.

The teaser for the film promised hip New York teens filming themselves during an alien invasion. Between the Escape from New York homage and the name “J.J. Abrams” — better known at the time for Alias and Lost instead of Star Trek Into Darkness or Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — the Cloverfield trailer created a buzz that concealed the finished product from director Matt Reeves and writer Drew Goddard.

Cloverfield left viewers hungry for a sequel that further developed the world, and Paramount was quick to acquiesce. But instead of giving fans another found footage chronicle of the central monster’s attack on New York, Abrams’s production company Bad Robot retrofitted a project called The Cellar into 10 Cloverfield Lane, directed by Dan Trachtenberg and written by Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle. That movie, of course, resulted in another sci-fi horror classic starring May Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, and John Gallagher Jr.

The third attempt at reimagining an existing script into a Cloverfield sequel didn’t work as well, when a project called The God Particle became The Cloverfield Paradox. Paramount briefly considered making another project into a fourth Cloverfield movie — a script by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods called A Quiet Place.

Of course, the studio and writers eventually passed on the idea of turning A Quiet Place into another Cloverfield sequel, and instead the standalone movie became a horror hit for Paramount, directed by John Krasinski. But for the third entry in the Quiet Place saga, it appears that the franchise is winking back at its older alien invasion sibling. The first trailer for A Quiet Place: Day One, which you can watch below, features nondescript New Yorkers set upon by alien monsters from the sky, just like the first Cloverfield.

A Quiet Place: Day One comes from writer and director Michael Sarnoski, who made his feature debut in 2021 with the excellent Nicolas Cage vehicle Pig. Sarnoski brings one of his Pig stars Alex Wolff to Day One, casting him alongside Lupita Nyong’o as cat lady Sam and Stranger Things breakout Joseph Quinn as businessman Eric.

They’ll be joined by Djimon Hounsou as an unnamed character, previously seen in the sequel A Quiet Place Part II. Despite being featured heavily in trailers for Part II, the always fantastic Hounsou had only a few scenes as the head of a group of survivors sequestered on an island. Based on the trailer, Hounsou’s unnamed character is the only returning face from previous entries. However, the clips of Krasinski’s Lee Abbot and Emily Blunt’s Evelyn Abbott, taken from previous films, might be more than mere continuity for casual viewers. Given that Krasinski and Blunt are currently making A Quiet Place Part III, it wouldn’t be much of a leap for them to show up in Day One.

Perhaps the most notable connection between Day One and the original Cloverfield is in the 9/11 imagery, seen in the trailer above with smashed buildings and Nyong’o’s dust-covered face. Will the imagery give Day One a relevancy missing from the enjoyable preceding Quiet Place films? Or will it pale in comparison to the more immediate Cloverfield? We’ll see when A Quiet Place: Day One comes to theater on June 28.

A Quiet Place: Day One releases in theaters on June 28, 2024.