Batman Director Has Plan For Sequel To Found Footage Monster Hit
Matt Reeves wants to make a sequel to Cloverfield.
Cloverfield is more than just a street in Santa Monica. In 2008, the word took on a frightening and mysterious identity with the release of Cloverfield, the found footage phenomenon from The Batman director Matt Reeves and producer J.J. Abrams. The film spawned two sequels, and in an interview with Syfy, Reeves teased his thoughts about where the Cloverfield universe could go next.
“There’s no question it would be a viral movie, right? It would be about a virus. Every movie that I’ve made is some sort of depiction of my internal anxiety … I think today, it would absolutely come from the uncertainty of what you can’t see and the idea that being next to someone, you could catch something.”
-Matt Reeves
Cultural anxiety is exactly what Cloverfield preyed upon in 2008. Reeves likened today’s fear of viruses with the post-9/11 anxiety about terrorism present when the first film was released. Reeves even credited his personal fears with his career success, saying, “I think I wouldn’t be a filmmaker if I didn’t have anxiety.”
Reeves backed away from any further details, probably because another Cloverfield project is, indeed, on the way. Babak Anvari, director of episodes of Monsterland and the Netflix thriller I Came By, is attached to helm the next installment in the Cloverfield anthology. Naturally, aside from the involvement of J.J. Abrams, little else is known about the film.
Predicting the path of the Cloverfield universe is next to impossible. The films are an anthology loosely centered around the arrival of an alien kaiju on Earth. The original film takes a street-level view of the monster’s arrival, while 90 percent of 10 Cloverfield Lane takes place in a bunker with no indication of whether or not the alleged apocalypse outside is real or not, and The Cloverfield Paradox documents a space mission gone horribly wrong.
The franchise is ingenious in its diversity of storytelling. Even though each film reveals part of the mystery, the full picture is far from complete. Though Reeves kept his lid shut about the immediate future of Cloverfield, he did shed some light on his original installment, specifically about the monster wrecking Manhattan.
“…[Y]ou have to understand what’s going on with [the monster] emotionally,” Reeves explained. “And for me, the big secret was that the monster was a baby and was experiencing separation anxiety. The reason the monster was freaking out is because they were having fits based on looking for their mother.” He went on to say that the combination of terrified humans battling a monster that was just as scared as they were would make for quite a mess.
And what a mess it was. Cloverfield was a sensation from the moment its mysterious trailer dropped in front of Michael Bay’s Transformers in 2007. Its guerilla marketing and mystery tactics drew fans in, and Reeves and his team delivered one of the most iconic found footage films ever made.
It is also one of the highest-grossing found footage films, coming in only behind The Blair Witch Project and the first three Paranormal Activity films.
Matt Reeves’ career as a director has exploded since Cloverfield. He took on two acclaimed Planet of the Apes sequels and, most recently, The Batman. He is hard at work on a sequel to the latest iteration of the World’s Greatest Detective, along with a host of spin-off projects that will expand his gritty vision of Gotham City even further.
J.J. Abrams has too many projects on the way to list them all, but in addition to the next Cloverfield project, he is involved with Reeves on a new animated Batman series expected to release in 2023, a TV series called Duster, which chronicles the adventures of a getaway driver as life goes from bad to worse, and Demimonde, a paranormal thriller that is facing an uncertain future after budget disputes at HBO Max.
Matt Reeves made his mark on movies with Cloverfield. Whatever the next installment of Cloverfield looks like, it is sure to go viral, perhaps in more ways than one.
