We've seen the A Quiet Place: Day One trailer already, and while the marketing has been pretty effective for the movie so far, I had no idea coming into CinemaCon 2024 that Day One footage would be among the stuff that really has stuck with me. In fact, the Paramount CinemaCon 2024 panel ended on Thursday afternoon, and I'm still thinking about one new scene the studio shared with us in new footage when it dropped footage revealing new details about what to expect from the prequel.
It's a brief moment -- so there's no huge worry about major spoilers, but I will be talking about one very short scene.
We know Day One will follow Lupita Nyong’o on the titular Day 1 of the invasion. People are learning the new rules in the new environment they are being subjected to. Her character, Sam, is the one who is mostly followed in the first trailer, as we see her evade creatures in New York. There are snippets of her running with a man played by Joseph Quinn and another man, played by Djimon Hounsou, but in general we didn’t know a ton about what would be coming.
In the new look at the movie, we learn Quinn’s character Eric meets up with Sam while the two of them are still in New York and figuring out the rules. They make a pact – whispering of course – to get out of dodge together, and they start moving toward their goals. Eventually they decide to enter a large office building while still in New York, and this is the moment that really has me hooked about seeing the movie. Like, really, really hooked.
We got to see a tense scene in which the two characters are trying to use a revolving door to get into an office building. Unfortunately, Quinn's character finds there's an obstacle: a briefcase is stuck where the door meets the frame and they can’t push through. Some monsters are approaching down the street and the tension is so palpable you can almost see it rather than feel it.
The audience gets a brief reprieve when he quietly starts to push the door open inch by inch. It doesn’t budge and doesn’t budge, but then it does and the tension passes. … at least until the briefcase drops, making a loud sound. Maybe you could feel it coming while reading. I did too, but it didn't make it any less show-stopping to watch on screen.
I can't stop thinking about the short scene. It was maybe 10 seconds or so in a giant montage of footage ahead of the release of the upcoming 2024 movie, and it ties in with a moment in the trailer that dropped in which we see Eric and Sam running through an office building and creatures raining down on them through a glass ceiling. But this scene really gripped me and pulled me in in a way I wasn’t expecting.
That June 28th release date can't come soon enough. Definitely one of the movies you'll be wanting to watch this summer.
Look, I was already planning to see this movie, as I’m really interested in learning how people figured out noise was their enemy and eventually worked toward a future where ALS communication was the norm by the time we got to the Abbott family's story in the timeline. The posters lining the hallways here at CinemaCon amped that up a bit with taglines like "hear how it all began" and advertisements encouraging fans to "be quiet." The posters were great. The footage was better. The moment with the jammed door was the best.
