J.J. Abrams has produced a new Cloverfield movie - now with added trailer and poster!

J.J. Abrams has produced a new Cloverfield movie - now with added trailer and poster!

Well this one came out of nowhere. Last April we reported that Star Wars: The Force Awakens' director J.J. Abrams was producing a psychological thriller called Valencia. Dan Trachtenberg, who'd made a splash with his videogame-inspired short film Portal: No Escape, was the director. It now turns out that Valencia was just a placeholder title, with those scamps at Abrams' Bad Robot pulling the wool over our eyes. The film's real title is 10 Cloverfield Lane. Update: and the trailer is now officially online, courtesy of studio Paramount.



Rather than a sequel to Matt Reeves' 2008 found-footage monster movie, Abrams tells Collider that the new film is "a blood relative to Cloverfield". He says the idea has been percolating for some time, and that, with typical secrecy, he wanted to hold back the real title for as long as possible.



Back last year, we were told that the scenario involved a teenage girl awakening in a cellar after a car crash to discover from a strange caretaker that society has been devastated by nuclear attack. Clearly the details of that cataclysm are now rather more specific, although the extent to which young Clover will have a bearing on the new proceedings remains to be seen. Sounds like he's more of a context for a completely different story (in much the same way, incidentally, that Portal spun off from Half Life 2).

The story's girl is Mary Elizabeth Winstead, with John Goodman the Caretaker, and John Gallagher Jr. also present in the basement. The script is the work of Dan Casey, who reshaped an earlier draft by Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken. 10 Cloverfield Lane is out in the US on March 11 before arriving on these shores on April 8.