The first spinoff in the A Quiet Place franchise now has an official title, one that immediately creates a challenge for itself following the success of the first two films. While a direct sequel to A Quiet Place Part II will not be released until 2025 at the earliest, a new addition to the budding franchise, A Quiet Place: Day One, will hit theaters in 2023. Michael Sarnoski, who impressed critics with his 2021 directorial debut Pig, will direct the spinoff, with John Krasinski serving as a producer.
Krasinski’s own directorial debut, A Quiet Place, likewise managed to please both critics and audiences and went on to claim $341 million at the box office–all on a $17 million budget. Despite the commercial success, audiences had to wait a long time for A Quiet Place Part II due to pandemic-related delays. With the sequel maintaining the same level of quality as the first film and proving that the story could be expanded in many different ways, both A Quiet Place 3 and potential spinoffs were expected. Now, the official announcement for A Quiet Place: Day One reveals key information about the franchise’s very first spinoff.
A Quiet Place is known for using title cards to illustrate how many days it has been since it all started, meaning that A Quiet Place: Day One will take the story back to the apocalypse’s very beginning. However, A Quiet Place 2‘s opening sequence already offered a great look at “day one” of the alien invasion, at least in terms of the Abbott’s family point of view. The first few minutes of A Quiet Place Part II were almost a short film of their own and managed to perfectly translate the panic and the horror of the beginning of an apocalypse. By taking the story back to “day one”, A Quiet Place: Day One created a challenge for itself on how to surpass the scene from John Krasinski’s film or, at the very least, offer something different.
One of the reasons why the prologue in A Quiet Place Part II worked so well is because it was relatively short. One of the strengths of the first A Quiet Place movie was precisely skipping any complex explanations about the origins of the apocalypse, with the film instead diving right into the Abbott family’s survival story. The idea that A Quiet Place Part II would show how it all began seemed worrying at the time, but the direction of John Krasinski managed to deliver something satisfying that did not ruin the atmosphere of mystery so crucial to the franchise. With A Quiet Place: Day One revisiting the beginnings of the alien invasion, there is now a challenge as to how to balance what should be shown and what should remain a mystery – as well as what should be replicated from the original films and what should be made different.
Expanding on a story that initially felt so self-contained is not easy, and the A Quiet Place spinoff will have an even bigger challenge going back to the beginning of the apocalypse. It remains unclear whether A Quiet Place: Day One will follow the mold of the first two films and tell the story of just one family or if it will go for a different dynamic. Either way, the film will have the almost paradoxical mission of delivering something new that also echoes what made the original films so good.
