10 Years Later, 10 Cloverfield Lane Feels Like A Road Not Taken
In another world not ruled by Marvel and DC, franchises may have looked completely different.
There’s a strange doublethink at work in 10 Cloverfield Lane. The movie is set almost entirely inside of a bunker, and our protagonist, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), is told by Howard (John Goodman), the man whose bunker she’s in, that the world outside has ended. All she remembers is being in a car crash, though, so part of the tension that fuels the movie is her feeling that she’s being lied to by a paranoid, deluded old man. But we know something that Michelle doesn’t. We know that she’s in a Cloverfield movie, and therefore that there’s some alien nonsense happening.
That tension between what we know and what Michelle knows is the fuel for much of what happens in 10 Cloverfield Lane, and a decade later, it feels like a road not taken. Weeks after this movie hit theaters, Batman fought Superman and Iron Man fought Captain America. The Cloverfield Paradox hit Netflix a few years later, and was so baffling that it killed the franchise off completely. For a brief moment, though, 10 Cloverfield Lane seemed like it could provide a roadmap for how to play inside of an existing franchise without making what is essentially just a really expensive TV show.
10 Cloverfield Lane has essentially no crossover with the original Cloverfield, which was released eight years earlier. It features a new cast of characters, and is set in an entirely different place. Even more crucially, it was a fundamentally different kind of movie. The original Cloverfield is a found footage horror film that delights in all the things that happen just off screen. 10 Cloverfield Lane is a tense thriller, taking place almost entirely in a single location, in which three characters test each other and try to live together. The only thing the movies really have in common in their name, something recognizable that audiences can latch onto.
The Cloverfield franchise, as nascent as it was, was defined by experimentation, by the idea that a franchise didn’t have to be one thing, it just had to take place in one universe. That fell apart when Paradox proved that the movies also have to be good for this model to work, but 10 Cloverfield Lane’s director, Dan Trachtenberg, seemed to remember the lessons from the success of his only movie in that universe.
When Trachtenberg was tasked with taking over the Predator franchise, he seemed to understand that you don’t need to tell a single, continuous story. Instead, he decided to use the Predator name to tell stories that he thought might be interesting. Prey, Predator: Killer of Killers and Predator Badlands are all very different movies, and the only thing that really unites them is the fact that a Predator is involved.
It’s a little bit like what Rian Johnson has done with the Knives Out franchise. There are a certain number of elements that you need to include — in Predator’s case that’s really just a predator, a character on an arc, and plenty of action — and those elements allow you flexibility in every other part of the story that you’re telling.
10 Cloverfield Lane landing when it did, amidst the glut of Marvel, the DCEU, and even Star Wars, meant that this kind of storytelling was probably never going to become the dominant mode of Hollywood entertainment. People were still interested in seeing every chapter in a single story, understanding that those chapters would build to massive events.
The genius of 10 Cloverfield Lane is how it folded in an original story, in this case a script called The Cellar, into a larger franchise — a practice that is all but lost today.
A decade later, though, the approach that Trachtenberg took seems a little bit prescient. We are living in an era where movies that are part of a franchise are not guaranteed to be hugely successful. Instead, some combination of recognizable IP and a sense that the movie itself is going to be worth watching seem to dictate which movies succeed and which ones fail (it also helps if your movie is for children).
That old model of franchise filmmaking still has some purchase, but the new version of the DC Universe seems to be taking some of its approach from what 10 Cloverfield Lane did. These movies are more tightly connected, to be sure, but ultimately, the goal is to create interesting movies that are all connected to one another, and use the properties as a jumping off point to tell stories that are worth telling.
Ten years ago, 10 Cloverfield Lane felt a little bit like an experiment, and the Cloverfield iteration of it crashed and burned. Now, though, that movie is an important reminder that audiences don’t just hunger for the same thing over and over again. Sometimes, they want something new, and they like it even better when it’s new and good.
