‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Trailer Brings Chills to CinemaCon as Paramount Forges Ahead Despite Sale Talks

Pamela McClintock
·4 min read
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Paramount’s A Quiet Place: Day One is getting ready to bring chills to audiences.

Stars Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn on Thursday introduced extended footage of the prequel to movie theater owners gathered in Las Vegas this week for CinemaCon, where they are being briefed by Hollywood studios on their upcoming slates (the footage won’t be shared outside the room, since the movie is close to opening and there have been numerous trailers already).

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The event spinoff pic is a cornerstone of Paramount’s slate, and hopes to be another win for the innovative horror franchise created by John Krasinski that turned into a major hit after successfully proving that original stories can work on a large, commercial scale.

Krasinksi is a key member of Paramount’s inner circle of filmmakers, along with Neal H. Moritz, Ryan Reynolds and Damien Chazelle. During his time onstage Thursday, Paramount film boss Brian Robbins announced that Krasinski has renewed his first-look deal with Paramount. There’s also a new deal with Moritz, while Reynold’s Maximum Effort recently reupped its pact with the studio. Krasinski and Reynolds are also behind Paramount’s May pic IF, which was likewise was featured during Paramount’s CinemaCon presentation.

With these announcements, Robbins isn’t letting looming chances of a Viacom/Paramount sale stop him for pushing ahead and plotting out his slate. To the contrary, much of Thursday’s presentation focused on 2025 titles, several of them new, and even titles dated for 2026. “Simply put, we are a home for the most talented filmmakers and storytellers, and we have a bold and diverse slate of films coming your way,” Robbins said.

The acerbic exec didn’t try to ignore the very large elephant in the room when taking the stage at CinemaCon to speak to theater owners: “There’s been a lot of speculation about our parent company, around MMA activity, and in fact, our very own Chris Aronson has thrown his hat into the ring as a bidder for Paramount Pictures. He’s started a Kickstarter campaign.”

A Quiet Place: Day One hits theaters June 28, a prime summer date. Like numerous other Hollywood studio titles, Day One‘s release was delayed due last year’s labor strikes (in fact, a trailer for the film was shown last year at CinemaCon as well).

Set within the same world of the first two Quiet Place movies — where blind, monster-like aliens hunt down anything making a sound — the story switches from the Abbott family and follows a woman played by Nyong’o as she navigates the horrific first moments of the alien vision in New York City. She soon joins up with a fellow city resident and together they try to survive living in the loudest city in the world — which now must be quiet.

“The story is at a scale more compelling and more terrifying than ever,” Nyong’o told exhibitors.

The extended trailer captures the essence of what it might be like to find yourself trapped in a quiet New York, trying to find aliens who can maneuver everywhere: skyscraper walls, tunnels, etc. Together, the two young characters must find a way to escape the city and protect those they find along the way.

The Paramount film is based on an original idea from A Quiet Place filmmaker Krasinski and is directed by Pig’s Michael Sarnoski, who also wrote the script. Along with Alex Wolff, Djimon Hounsou and Denis O’Hare also star.

A Quiet Place became a surprise smash in 2018, turning Krasinski into an A-list director. It earned $340.9 million globally, with the sequel, A Quiet Place Part II, grossing $297.3 million globally in 2021, a strong showing as the theatrical business was coming out of the pandemic.

Krasinski spoke last year at CinemaCon about traveling the country to screenings of Part II as people started returning to theaters, calling it a great honor of his career.

The Quiet Place franchise was born from an original spec script by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, who shared screenplay credit with Krasisnki. He performed his own work on the script after boarding as director. Krasinski is also developing A Quiet Place: Part III.

A Quiet Place: Day One is due out in theaters March 8, 2024. Michael Bay, Andrew Form, Brad Fuller and Krasinski are producing the feature.

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