Lupita Nyong’o plays a terminally ill woman in A Quiet Place: Day One, and the film drops her into the first hours of an alien invasion of New York City. The creatures are blind and hear almost everything. The movie had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival on June 26, 2024, as a special presentation held after the festival itself, which ran June 5 to 16. Paramount Pictures released it in the US two days later.
Michael Sarnoski wrote and directed. The story is his and John Krasinski’s, and the film is the third in the series and a prequel spinoff of the first. Joseph Quinn co-stars. Djimon Hounsou returns from A Quiet Place Part II as Henri.
A change of directors
Paramount announced the spinoff in November 2020, with Jeff Nichols set to write and direct from a story by Krasinski. Krasinski said in May 2021 that Nichols had turned in a finished script. By October, Nichols was out, having left to work on a different project at Paramount. Sarnoski was named his replacement in January 2022. Krasinski had approached him after seeing his debut feature, Pig, released in 2021.
Nyong’o and Quinn signed on in November 2022. Alex Wolff, who starred in Pig, joined in January 2023 as Reuben, a hospice nurse.
Shooting New York in London
Cameras rolled from Feb. 6 to April 11, 2023, in London, even though the story is set in New York. At Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden, the crew rebuilt four two-story New York blocks on the backlot, including Mott Street in Chinatown and sections of Harlem, the Lower East Side and the Upper East Side. The Charing Cross station stood in for the subway interiors, and Canary Wharf tube station for the exteriors. The budget was $67 million.
Frodo, the cat that belongs to Nyong’o’s character, Sam, took some persuading. Paramount executives wanted him computer-generated, but Sarnoski insisted on a real animal. Two cats, Nico and Schnitzel, shared the part. Nyong’o has a fear of cats. She worked through it with exposure therapy and adopted a cat of her own by the end of production.
The box office
The film opened to $52.2 million in the US and Canada, the best opening weekend in the series. It made $22.5 million on its first day, including $6.8 million from Thursday night previews, also a series best. It finished second behind Inside Out 2. Worldwide it grossed about $261.8 million.
Reviews were generally positive. On Rotten Tomatoes, 86 percent of 281 critics’ reviews were favorable, and Metacritic gave it 68 out of 100. Critics found it tense but less terrifying than its predecessors, and praised the performances. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a B+.
