A Quiet Place was a runaway hit. Worldwide, John Krasinski’s horror movie made $340 million on a budget of $17 million. Rarely does anyone make a genre movie that profitable without making the sequel. So here we are, one month away from the release of A Quiet Place Part II.
The New Teaser
Krasinski returned to direct the sequel, which some serious Aliens vibes. The first movie was more contained and mostly took place on a farm, but Part II has Emily Blunt and the family on the run. Why they left home after figuring out how to kill the aliens is anyone’s guess, but the first movie wasn’t exactly airtight when it came to logic, so who knows what to expect? At the very least, the family ditching the farm means they’ll run into the likes of Cillian Murphy, who looks just as intense as the monsters in the movie.
Enjoy the Silence
It’s a surprisingly talky and loud trailer for a sequel to a movie all about staying quiet. It was remarkable the first movie did as well as it since some skeptics believed audiences wouldn’t want to sit through so much silence. Audiences were captivated, though, and the silence worked. It was a novel approach to a horror movie. No longer was Krainski the guy from The Office, but a bonafide hit filmmaker. People doubted his vision for the first movie; they’re probably not doubting it for the second movie.
A Different Kind of Sequel?
Krainski isn’t just making the same movie over again. Originally, he wasn’t even interested in making a sequel. He had a change of heart, though, and imagined a story less about new villains or heroes but more about this new world. As Krainski previously said, he wanted to avoid where most sequels go wrong:
“Why I had this little idea that’s now gotten bigger is most sequels are about a villain returning or a hero returning, and you have to build this entire world around just the idea that I have a hero or a villain. That’s a lot, and I think that’s where a lot of sequels go wrong because as much as you love that hero or villain, the entire thing is fabricated just to make that person work.
[With A Quiet Place 2], we have the world. So it’s actually the world that’s built, it’s the idea that the rest of the world is going through this exact same experience. Are there other people that have to survive like this? It’s that idea of living through the set of circumstances, not again in the same way obviously, but exploring it more. You only got to do it intimately for a small amount of time, so what happens next?”
Krainski, who co-wrote the Gus Van Sant movie Promised Land, has a pretty strong sense of storytelling. He knows what works. It’s why he can take risks such as changing a creature’s design midway through production and have it payoff. On a Quiet Place, Krasinski and his team pulled a Sonic the Hedgehog movie by redesigning the aliens late in the game. They knew they didn’t work. Now, with the creatures in the daylight more, they look nastier and more aggressive than before.
Official Synopsis
Following the deadly events at home, the Abbott family (Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe) must now face the terrors of the outside world as they continue their fight for survival in silence. Forced to venture into the unknown, they quickly realize that the creatures that hunt by sound are not the only threats that lurk beyond the sand path.
A Quiet Place Part II opens in theaters March 20th.
