Another Cloverfield Movie Is In The Works At Paramount With Wounds Director Babak Anvari At The Helm

Like just about everything else related to Warner Bros. Discovery, Bad Robot's partnership with HBO Max and DC is very much on the fritz right now. Luckily, the company still has plenty of irons in other fires to fall back on elsewhere. With the future of the slow-moving "Star Trek 4" once again up in the air following Matt Shakman's recent exit as director, it seems a different Bad Robot sci-fi project is roaring back to life over at Paramount Pictures.

According to Deadline, Paramount has a new "Cloverfield" movie in the works, with J.J. Abrams (as always) producing for Bad Robot. The film is being written by Joe Barton, who also penned 2017's "The Ritual" and recently created the sci-fi series "The Lazarus Project" for Sky Max. Babak Anvari ("Under the Shadow," "Wounds") is attached to direct, with original "Cloverfield" writer-director duo Drew Goddard and Matt Reeves also onboard as executive producers.

If Barton's name rings a bell when it comes to "Cloverfield," it might be because he's been attached to write this film since at least early 2021. Back when the news of his involvement first broke, it was reported this new "Cloverfield" movie would be a direct sequel to Goddard and Reeves' original 2008 found-footage monster flick, minus the found-footage aspect.

By comparison, 2016's excellent "10 Cloverfield Lane" was not a proper followup but a spinoff film that paralleled its predecessor in terms of certain genre and tonal elements while otherwise standing apart as very much its own thing (a largely single-setting thriller, to be exact). Then came the snafu that was 2018's "The Cloverfield Paradox," a movie that began as an original sci-fi project titled "God Particle" only to be retroactively — and, to be frank, rather clumsily — remolded into a "Cloverfield" film that hastily tries to link all the entries in the franchise through a muddled story about portals being accidentally opened between parallel universes.

Probably for the better, it sounds like the latest "Cloverfield" film may act as something of a soft reboot by mostly ignoring the events of the second and third entries in the property without, per se, wiping them from the canon (again, no shade against "10 Cloverfield Lane," which is legit terrific). /Film will, of course, keep you updated on the still very hush-hush project as more details come our way.