By A Quiet Place, a cool movie and massive commercial success, will be getting a sequel, as Paramount announced at CinemaCon. The movie made $213 million against a $17 million budget, so a sequel was inevitable. Hell, ten sequels are probably inevitable for that kind of mega-millions. And the original screenwriters, Bryan Woods and Scott Beck are on board, saying that they have plenty of extra material.
I do have to wonder what kind of material that is, though.
A Quiet Place works as a lean parable that, for my money, already runs ten minutes longer and explains more than it ought to. When screenwriters say “plenty of material” for something as vague as this, my first worry is that they’ll try to explain the setup. How did the world end up like this? How did the monsters get here? What are the monsters, really? What do they want? These are fascinating questions to ask that will undoubtedly make for weak movies. Our imagined mechanics for the situation will be different than the screenwriters’ explanation, and that explanation will have some contrived bit that can’t be ignored, because they decided to make a movie trying to explain what is inexplicable.
Anyone sitting for a showing of A Quiet Place knows off-the-bat that the lifestyle of this family is completely unsustainable. You snore, you catch a cold, you laugh, you cough, you yawn, you’re dead. It doesn’t work, and that’s totally fine. The movie doesn’t need that. Sequels normally try to examine and open a world, and A Quiet Place would only crumble under that scrutiny.
Maybe I’ll be wrong. The screenwriters might have ideas that don’t undermine the vague nature of the original. I just hope that six years down the road, A Quiet Place doesn’t become that quickly dried franchise that leaves us rolling our eyes and hoping that Paramount puts it out of its misery.
