During the 2018 holiday season, Netflix had a viral hit on their hands with the release of Bird Box, a sci-fi dystopian thriller about a wiped-out society forced to wear blindfolds in order to escape monsters that drive its onlookers to suicide. Sandra Bullock’s recent film inspired the popular and dangerous #BirdBoxChallenge and continues to be one of the streaming service’s most massive hits. So naturally, it’s getting a spinoff.
The producers behind the 2018 film, Dylan Clark and Chris Morgan, are behind a new film that will follow Bird Box’s concept through a different set of characters living in Spain. The movie, which will be made in the Spanish language, is set to begin production in the European country later this year from a script by Alex and David Pastor, per THR.
The Pastor brothers previously wrote the screenplays for the 2009 virus movie Carriers starring Chris Pine, as well as the 2015 sci-fi action flick Self/less starring Ryan Reynolds. It sounds like the Bird Box spinoff could be a great fix for fans of the concept by exploring how its idea affects survivors on the other side of the world, and thus build out the story into a larger Netflix franchise.
Bird Box was based on a 2014 novel by Josh Malerman, which has since been given a sequel on the page called Malorie. Following the success of the Netflix movie, Malerman revisited his story with a continuation that sees Bullock’s character 12 years after the events of the original. When he was promoting the book, he said a Bird Box 2 film adaptation was in the works as well. So it’s possible that fans of the movies could get this spinoff and an eventual follow-up to the story of Malore and her kids, Boy and Girl.
Netflix has been expanding its foreign-language library as of late, and the Bird Box spinoff being a Spanish-language production is further confirmation that the streaming service is serious about providing more event projects in Spanish. This is also happening in regards to Zack Snyder’s upcoming Army of the Dead movie. The Justice League filmmaker has already made a prequel series for the film in German, along with a separate anime series in the works.
The original 2018 film had a packed cast including Sarah Paulson, John Malkovich, Jacki Weaver, Rosa Salazar, Lil Rel, BD Wong and Machine Gun Kelly. Netflix boasted that Bird Box reached 26 million viewers in its first week alone, and reportedly remains one of the best debuts for the platform, aside from last spring’s Extraction, which beat out Bird Box’s initial first four week numbers to become the No. 1 biggest Netflix original movie yet.
We’d expect the Bird Box spinoff to hit Netflix as early as 2022. While we wait, check out all the movies coming to the streaming service throughout 2021 here on CinemaBlend.
