With the still-untitled A Quiet Place 2 not due to come out for well over a year, it’s not surprising that writer-director John Krasinski has been keeping very, well, quiet on the project as of late. But while it sounds like the filmmaker is still working out the details of the follow-up to his acclaimed horror hit, the Jack Ryan star is starting to open up a little about the approach he’s taking to the sequel.
Krasinski has hinted in the past that he’s more interested in further exploring the post-apocalyptic world introduced in the first movie than continuing the story of the Abbott family, and in a recent interview with Deadline, the filmmaker elaborated on this notion, saying:
“The idea for it is pretty simple. I’m writing now—I don’t have it fleshed out—but the thought that occurred to me, that really excited me about it, was that most sequels are about the return of a hero or a villain. You take this character that people loved once and you bring them back, and you have to create a new world around them. We have the exact opposite setup. We have the world, and you can drop whoever you want into that world and everyone feels connected to it.”
From the sound of things, we could be looking at a series model in the vein of George A. Romero’s zombie movies, where each sequel has little-to-no narrative overlap with what came before, save for the fictional reality it inhabits. Krasinski went on to explain that it was the potential of this cinematic world populated by sound-sensitive monsters that inspired him to sign on for A Quiet Place 2.
“The reason I decided to go back, in the end, was this world is so rich, and it’s so much fun to explore. There are so many different things to see now. Everyone else in the world is experiencing this, so I’m curious to see what that looks like from another perspective.”
That being said, the writer also admits that he may have let himself be manipulated a little into wanting to make the movie, explaining:
“I’ll be honest with you: I really didn’t want to do the sequel. It was never built to launch sequels, which we all knew, and the studio knew too. But also, I’m a realist. I know that when you have a success like this, everyone wants to make another one. I told them to go find another filmmaker and writer, and they said, ‘But don’t you have an idea?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I have a tiny idea,’ so they said, ‘OK, while we’re talking to other people, keep thinking about it.’ They basically mind-tricked me into wanting to write it.”
But whatever Krasinski’s reasons were for signing on for this next film, it’s clear that there’ll be a lot of fans eager to see how he fleshes out the incessantly tense world he helped create. And we’ll find out if A Quiet Place 2 can live up to the hype when the film hits theaters on May 15th, 2020.
