Thanks to the critical and financial success of 2016's 10 Cloverfield Lane, the Cloverfield series has become a special little oddity in the movie world - finding a way to tell original stories in a franchise format - but today we have some unfortunate news. While it originally looked like we were going to get the untitled third movie in the run this fall, Paramount Pictures has made the decision to push it back to the early months of 2018.
Deadline has the news of multiple Paramount release day shifts, including that Cloverfield 3 (whatever it winds up being called) will no longer be coming out on October 27th - where it was scheduled to go head-to-head with the new Saw film,Jigsaw. Instead, the studio has decided to now have it out on February 2, 2018 - which also happens to be Super Bowl Weekend. It's noteworthy that this is actually the second time that the project has changed release dates, as it was originally going to be released on February 24th of this year (back when it was titled The God Particle).
In a way, this begins a certain level of tradition for the Cloverfield titles, as now it's shaping up as a winter franchise. Matt Reeves' Cloverfield had a mid-January release when it came out back in 2008, and Paramount made the decision to have 10 Cloverfield Lane in theaters in early March of last year. Given that there's typically much less box office competition in the early months of the year, the move could wind up working out very well in Cloverfield 3's favor - though it is worth pointing out that other titles set to come out in February 2018 include Black Panther, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Fifty Shades Freed, and The Maze Runner: The Death Cure.
Directed by Julius Onah and based on a script by Oren Uziel and Doug Jung (Star Trek Beyond), the third Cloverfield movie is set in outerspace and follows a team of astronauts who experience reality-warping events. Not much is really known about the story beyond that, but the ensemble the project has put together is impressive - including David Oyewolo, Elizabeth Debicki, Daniel Bruhl, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Chris O'Dowd, and Zhang Ziyi. We can only hope that so many great actors became involved with the film because they really loved the script and wanted to be a part of making it a reality.
It's kind of a bummer that audiences won't have Cloverfield 3 to watch when Halloween season rolls around this year, but given the quality of the two preceding titles, we have faith that it will be worth the wait. Because of the release date change, it will probably still be a while before we get our first look at the low-budget sci-fi feature in the form of trailers or stills, but stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for the latest updates.
