At long last, A Quiet Place Part II is now playing in theaters and looking to top the box office in the face of stiff competition from Emma Stone’s Disney origin story Cruella, with both tracking for solid pandemic-era openings roundabout the $30 million mark for the five-day frame.
It’s been a long time coming for John Krasinski’s horror sequel, which got as far as holding its world premiere in the first week of March 2020 to hype a release on the 18th of that month, before the Coronavirus pandemic came along and changed the industry as we knew it. Fourteen months later, Part II is finally out in the wild and while it hasn’t been receiving quite the same level of critical acclaim as its predecessor, reviews have been hugely positive across the board nonetheless.
In a surprising turn of events, Take Shelter and Midnight Special‘s Jeff Nichols was announced to be writing and directing a spinoff set in the Quiet Place universe with Krasinski set to remain on board as a producer. We haven’t heard much about that project since it was initially announced in November of last year, but in a new interview, the former Office star, filmmaker and potential Reed Richards admitted that he’s already knocking around ideas for a third installment in the main timeline.
“It’s interesting, I genuinely hadn’t thought about a second one when I was doing the first one. However, I really had these questions while I was doing it. I put the fires out in the distance in the first one, and I always thought to myself, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we got to explore where those fires lead to? Who’s on the other end of those fires?’ But I never thought that there would be a sequel. So then when I actually came around to writing the sequel, I started with the fires. And so this time, I think when my brain started wandering of questions of what would this mean later on, I started to write down notes in case I could prepare myself for a third one.”
Pretty much any horror movie that does big business at the box office gets franchised to within an inch of its life, but A Quiet Place and its follow-up are hugely intense and atmospheric exercises in generating the biggest and most visceral reactions possible through the power of suggestion more than jump scares, so any new adventures would definitely be welcome.