You have to hand it to J.J. Abrams and his mystery box. Late last night, Twitter lit up with reports of a strange new trailer for a movie titled 10 Cloverfield Lane, which was playing before screenings of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Today, Paramount put the trailer online for your obsessive analysis:
So what is 10 Cloverfield Lane, anyway? Details are scarce, but it seems to be the movie previously announced as Valencia, a thriller about a woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) being held in the bomb shelter of a man who claims the world outside has been destroyed (John Goodman). Before this trailer, the outside threat had been described as a "chemical attack" or "nuclear fallout" — but it's just as easy to imagine a version of this story where the outside threat is a Godzilla-esque monster attack, as in the original Cloverfield.
In a statement at Collider, J.J. Abrams offered a vague explanation for 10 Cloverfield Lane's connection to the original. "The idea came up a long time ago during production," he said. "We wanted to make it a blood relative of Cloverfield. The idea was developed over time. We wanted to hold back the title for as long as possible."
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Of course, the original Cloverfield debuted with a similar splash in 2007, when a mysterious untitled trailer played before screenings of Transformers. We'll see if 10 Cloverfield Lane can equal the size of that smash hit — and we won't have to wait long, because it hits theaters on March 11.
