J.J. Abrams Drags Us Back Inside the Cloverfield Mystery Box

10 Cloverfield Lane was a “blood relative.” The Cloverfield Paradox promised we would finally “find out why.” Now J.J. Abrams, Hollywood’s resident trickster god, is claiming that his company Bad Robot is “developing a true, dedicated Cloverfield sequel,” to be released in theaters “very soon.” The old saying doesn’t get as far as “fool me thrice,” but maybe this time there’s reason to believe him.

Abrams made the announcement at CinemaCon before previewing Overlord, the World War II-era horror film that he denied was connected to the Cloverfield series. /Film ran a story to the contrary in January, days before Netflix shocked the world by releasing The Cloverfield Paradox hours after dropping the first trailer during the Super Bowl.

As anyone who’s watched them could probably tell, 10 Cloverfield Lane and The Cloverfield Paradox weren’t originally conceived as Cloverfield movies. Perhaps Overlord is an ex-Cloverfield movie, its sly references to the series’ mythology deleted in post-production. (We already have an almost-Cloverfield movie in A Quiet Place.) Paramount was so pessimistic about Paradox’s box office prospects that it sold almost all the rights to Netflix; the studio may have also cooled on the concept of a kinda-anthology franchise altogether.

Maybe that’s for the best. 10 Cloverfield Lane was so excellent that I forgave it for having nothing to do with the found footage spectacle of yuppies dodging a kaiju in Manhattan. The Cloverfield Paradox, on the other hand, took an already-unremarkable space station thriller and tacked on an explanation for the last two movies that was so broad I wondered why it bothered. The alternate-reality games where most of the mythology took form – Slusho, Tagruato, Bold Futura – are always fun, but you can’t build a franchise on them.

A direct Cloverfield sequel faces some challenges. All but one of the characters are dead – including the monster, if you believe 2008 Abrams instead of 2018 Abrams. Most of the people who’ve seen Cloverfield know nothing about its backstory, which was compelling mostly because of the way it was unveiled, all those MySpace pages and blogs and fake corporate websites. And unless that “very soon” release date means next week, it’s unclear where the surprise factor this franchise lives by will come from.

Here’s how I’d do it: make the videographers pursue the monster instead of the other way around, in a world where such attacks now happen every few years. No one knows why, no one’s particularly good at halting them. Our protagonists wouldn’t have it any other way. In Cloverfield, Hud explained his documentation by saying, “People are gonna want to know… how it all went down.” It stands to reason that people would be willing to pay to know how it all went down, and pay well.

I doubt anything like this will happen in Cloverfield 2; its lack of clear direction means it can travel in just about any direction it wishes. The biggest challenge may be getting audiences to care.