The Cloverfield franchise, in as much as there is one, is an odd beast. The second film came out of nowhere without us even being aware it was coming and the third film seemed ready to land without ever releasing a trailer. The third film in the Cloverfield series didn't have a title or an official plot synopsis but it did have a release date of February 2, which was odd considering we hadn't seen any marketing on it, but it turns out the reason for that is that the film has now been pushed back to April 20, 2018.
Release date shifts are nothing new for the Cloverfield project that is still without a title. It was originally set to release in February of 2017 before reshoots pushed the release into October. From there it was pushed to the previous date of February 2, 2018. Slashfilm now reports that the release date has been moved to April.
It's not particularly surprising to hear that the release date has been pushed back considering that February date was now less than a month away and we'd seen zero marketing. The film doesn't even have a name. We know the movie is based on a script for a movie called God Particle, but the only thing we seem to know for sure about this movie's title is that it won't be called God Particle.
Of course, if there was any movie for which a lack of marketing might have been an intentional decision, this one was it. Nobody was expecting a second film with Cloverfield in the title until the trailer for 10 Cloverfield Lane was released in theaters. That film starred John Goodman and Elizabeth Winstead and followed three people living in an underground shelter during what one of them claimed was an alien invasion.
The fact that 10 Cloverfield Lane seemingly appeared from nowhere was part of what made the movie interesting, though it also turned out to just be really good. It seems clear that part of the goal with this new feature is to release it with as little marketing as possible, so audiences go in blind. It's a worthy goal, but at the end of the day you still have to do some sort of promotion or nobody will even realize the movie exists.
The new script was originally about a group of astronauts who find themselves alone in space after use of a particle accelerator makes the Earth disappear. We know the script saw rewrites and the film saw reshoots, so the final version of the movie could be slightly, or drastically, different.
With Cloverfield 3 now set for April, there's a bit of time to do whatever marketing is planned. Perhaps we'll finally get a trailer, or a poster that includes a title, around the date of the original release.
