Academy Award-winner Lupita Nyong’o has reportedly joined the cast of A Quiet Place’s first spinoff, A Quiet Place: Day One (via Deadline). Following the surprising success of A Quiet Place (2018), which had a $17 million budget and went on to make $341 million at the box office, it was easy to predict that the horror meets sci-fi thriller would receive some sort of sequel. A Quiet Place Part II was released in 2021 and had a similarly strong box office run, leading not only to A Quiet Place 3 but also to a prequel movie. With A Quiet Place 3 expected to arrive in 2025, the franchise now focuses its efforts on the prequel Day One.
Lupita Nyong’o’s casting in A Quiet Place: Day One is the first major update on the A Quiet Place prequel since Michael Sarnoski was announced as the director. While not much is known about A Quiet Place: Day One’s plot, the fact the spinoff movie is going for such a high-profile actor as the lead is exciting. Replicating the success of the original movies is not always an easy task for prequels and spinoffs, and the “A Quiet Place” title alone would perhaps not be enough to sell the prequel film as a must-see. Lupita Nyong’o was recently the lead in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), a perfect example of how to combine horror with elements of sci-fi just like A Quiet Place is doing.
Lupita Nyong'o Is A Great Sign For A Quiet Place: Day One's Horror
Given how self-contained A Quiet Place (2018) had been, many people believed that a sequel to the horror film was not necessary. However, once Cillian Murphy was cast in a mysterious A Quiet Place Part II role, it was difficult for audiences not to be excited about the movie. A similar thing can now happen with A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel story that some people deem unnecessary, but that could be a great horror movie on its own – starting with the promising cast of Lupita Nyong’o. Between the horror-comedy Little Monsters (2019) and Us, the latter of which might not have worked as well as it did without Lupita Nyong’o’s performance, the Oscar-winner actor is surely a great sign for A Quiet Place: Day One.
What Else We Know About A Quiet Place: Day One
While the A Quiet Place spinoff story was first announced at the end of 2020, the movie faced a setback once director Jeff Nichols exited the project on October 2021. Michael Sarnoski was then brought to helm the prequel in January 2022, and A Quiet Place: Day One is currently set to release on March 8, 2024. As suggested by the title, A Quiet Place: Day One will revisit the first day of the monster apocalypse seen in A Quiet Place. Nothing has been revealed regarding Lupita Nyong’o’s character, nor if Day One will have any connections to John Krasinski’s and Emily Blunt’s characters from A Quiet Place.
Although A Quiet Place Part II briefly revealed the first day of the apocalypse through the eyes of the main characters, how exactly the arrival of the monsters played out across the world remains a mystery. It is still too soon to say whether A Quiet Place: Day One will be more character-centered like the A Quiet Place movies, or if it will have a larger scale similar to other apocalypse movies such as World War Z. Either way, the simple yet effective horror approach of the A Quiet Place movies, plus the casting of Lupita Nyong’o, is enough to make A Quiet Place: Day One seem very promising.