Shh! John Krasinski Has Officially Started Writing the Sequel to A Quiet Place

Believe the hype — A Quiet Place is a horror movie masterpiece. The film, directed by and starring John Krasinski, follows a couple (Krasinski and real-life wife Emily Blunt) trying to raise their two children in a dystopian future. There's a terrifying catch, however — while the family is still able to maintain a sliver of normalcy (eating dinner together, going into town, playing board games), they live with the constant threat that aliens could kill them at any moment if they make a single sound. While the aliens are blind, they're incredibly fast and have freakishly good hearing, meaning that the characters must live life in near-permanent silence.

It's a thrilling, inventive premise, resulting in a tense, brutally scary addition to the horror genre. Of course, given A Quiet Place's stellar reviews and its ending (which we won't spoil for you here), it was ripe for a sequel. There are still plenty of fascinating things screenwriters Bryan Woods and Scott Beck could explore in a second crack at the nightmarish universe they've created, from the origin of the monsters to the stories of other survivors. Luckily for all of us, a second film is officially on the way!

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Paramount is moving ahead with a sequel after the film earned well over $213 million at the box office, internationally, including $135 million in North America. Given the film's $17 million price tag, it ended up being a hugely profitable success for the studio. A sequel is clearly a no-brainer.

In January 2019, Emily Blunt confirmed to Variety that her husband has begun writing the sequel. "Well, John is sort of in his writing cave, right now. On the first of January, he went to the gym, he came back and he was like, 'I'm starting.' So he's kind of plotting it all out now."

So, what would a second installment of A Quiet Place look like? When we attended a press conference with the writers ahead of the film's April release in 2018, both they and Krasinski teased what's to come. "It's such a fun world — there are so many things you could do," Woods responded when asked if we'd ever get another glimpse into the horrifically silent world. Beck also chimed in, noting that they have a ton of ideas just waiting to be brought to the big screen. "There are so many discarded set pieces, too, hiding in Word documents on our computer," he explained. "There are certainly so many different stories you could tell. It's just really, at the end of the day, who are the characters in this and what does this situation mean to that family?"

The writing duo also opened up to MovieWeb later about the film's sequel potential, joking that they'd have to title it A Quieter Place.

"I think at this point there's multiple universes that it could go in, to be completely honest," Beck said. "I think you could continue down one path, that's very obvious, or you could spin off into a completely unexpected direction, which is certainly always interesting for us. The uncharted territory of filmmaking is always where you find the best inspiration."

If any film out there is more deserving of becoming the next lauded horror movie franchise, A Quiet Place is it.