Calming the riots that have swept American streets ever since J.J. Abrams announced that Dan Trachtenberg’s Valencia—which Abrams is producing through his Bad Robot company—is now going by the title 10 Cloverfield Lane, the Star Wars director and part-time enigmatic mastermind has assured fans that he has a plan for the suddenly emergent “Cloverfield universe.” Speaking at the new movie’s premiere on Wednesday night, Abrams told reporters to think of the two films as “two different rides at the same amusement park”—presumably, the rollercoaster of manufactured drama Abrams creates every time one of these big “mystery projects” rolls around.
Abrams was quick to specify that the film—which stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a young woman apparently trapped in a bunker owned by a very nervous-looking John Goodman—wasn’t a sequel to his 2008 Godzilla riff, and that Cloverfield was “not just an anthology.” He didn’t elaborate on what it actually was, of course, suggesting that its nature might be revealed if enough people drop some cash to go see 10 Cloverfield Lane, a.k.a. the “I’ve got a secret, isn’t that interesting?” school of marketing that he’s been pioneering for years.