Is Dan Trachtenberg’s The Cellar, now titled 10 Cloverfield Lane, a secret Cloverfield sequel?
Moviegoers attending the first screenings of Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi tonight found a true surprise preceding the film in the form of a trailer for director Dan Trachtenberg‘s upcoming Paramount Pictures thriller. The film, formerly known as first The Cellar and later Valencia, is now being released under the title 10 Cloverfield Lane and stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman and John Gallagher, Jr. What’s more, there’s a heavy implication that the March 11 release is secretly the long-awaited sequel to Matt Reeves’ 2008 hit Cloverfield.
“The idea came up a long time ago during production,” J.J. Abrams said via an official statement from Paramount. “We wanted to make it a blood relative of ‘Cloverfield’. The idea was developed over time. We wanted to hold back the title for as long as possible.”
It’s unclear exactly how directly this “blood relative” will serve as a Cloverfield sequel and the mystery calls into question all the facts that have been revealed about the project so far. Initial reports on the film from back in 2014 said that it was originally scripted by Josh Campbell and Matt Steucken with Dan Casey having then provided a rewrite. According to those early reports, 10 Cloverfield Lane follows a girl who, after losing consciousness in a car accident, wakes up in an underground cellar with a man who tells her that the outside world has perished in a nuclear attack. Could that nuclear attack be connected to the Cloverfield monster or is the title meant to connect on a more thematic level, attempting to recapture the same mystery that audiences found when the Cloverfield trailer debuted before Michael Bay’s first Transformers film back in 2007?
Check back for updates as they become available and for the trailer itself as soon as it is officially released online.
What do you think is the secret behind 10 Cloverfield Lane? Is it really a Cloverfield sequel? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
UPDATE: The 10 Cloverfield Lane trailer is now online in what looks to be a bootleg form. Ordinarily, we would not condone posting a bootleg video, but, given the remarkable clarity of the footage and the incredible speed at which it seems to have come online, it’s quite likely that the “bootleg” angle is part of an official reveal.
UPDATE #2: We’ve now added the official trailer and the poster below.
