A Quiet Place Part II recently had the biggest opening weekend of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has already grossed $138 million worldwide on a $61 million budget.
So it’s not much of a surprise that more films are in development for the franchise. Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter, Midnight Special) has been hired to direct a Quiet Place spinoff, due for a 2023 release.
Nichols will also write the script, and the story will be totally separate from the main films. There’s still talk that John Krasinski has ideas for a third Quiet Place film, but if so, that will almost certainly arrive after this spinoff.
We don’t yet know anything about Nichols’ film, but he’s shown throughout his career that he’s great at using unique settings. The sci-fi world of Midnight Special, the island in Mud, the apocalyptic world in Take Shelter were all expertly weaponized into well received movies, so it will be fascinating to see what he can do with the world of A Quiet Place.
This will be Nichols’ first film since 2016’s Loving, which focused on Richard and Mildred Loving, the plaintiffs in the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn state laws that prohibited interracial marriage.
Nichols is currently writing Yankee Comandante, adapted from David Grann‘s New Yorker article about Che Guevara and William Alexander Morgan.
In some ways it’s a shame that the lessons studios took from the original A Quiet Place – an original movie that grossed $341 million on a $21 million budget – was not that there’s still a demand for original films, and that directors with original ideas should be given the chance to make them, but instead “they liked A Quiet Place, so let’s make more.”
That’s not to say that Quiet Place sequels are inherently bad, but it would have been a little more interesting if Nichols was given the opportunity to make his own mid budget horror movie rather than piggyback off someone else’s idea. But that’s the business now; Paramount are surely hoping A Quiet Place can turn into a Conjuring-esque cinematic universe.
#Peace.Love.AQuietPlace
