Jeff Nichols' A Quiet Place spin-off is coming in 2023
Now that it’s a bona-fide horror franchise—complete with a bigger, and ironically louder, sequel—it’s time for the A Quiet Place cinematic universe to take that next big empire-building plunge: That’s right, it’s spin-off time, baby. Rather than go the route of its sudden rivals over in The Conjuring films, though, and hand such a side project up to a young up-and-comer, we’ve known for a while now that writer-director John Krasinski was passing his baby off to an established, if unexpected name: Take Shelter and Midnight Special director Jeff Nichols.
Nichols is an interesting fit for a franchise predicated largely on alien attacks and external tensions; while you could certainly argue that, say, Take Shelter is a horror film, it’s one where the most horrifying things potentially happen only in its main characters’ heads. On the other hand, Nichols has a long track record of getting strong performances out of young actors (he also directed Mud, after all), which should be a pretty major boon, given the AQP franchise’s emphasis on family dynamics. Also, we just kind of want to see what years of enforced silence have done to Michael Shannon’s already prominent glower, if we’re being 100 percent honest.
News of the spin-off resurfaced a few days ago, after Rotten Tomatoes’ Erik Davis reported on an interview with Krasinski, in which he stated that Nichols had just handed in his script for the film. (Davis initially referred to Nichols’ movie as a formal Part III, but other outlets are continuing to refer to the film as a side project.) Krasinski also noted that the film is currently set for 2023, although given what happened to Part II—which had its full-fledged premiere in 2020, before getting delayed a full year by the COVID-19 pandemic—god only knows when Nichols’ movie might actually show up.