Why 'A Quiet Place Part III' Is Almost Certainly Going to Happen
The cliffhanger ending is clearly setting up a third 'A Quiet Place' movie.
This post contains spoilers for A Quiet Place Part II.
When John Krasinski's A Quiet Place came out in 2018, it didn't really beg for a sequel. The Abbott family discovers "WHAT IS THE WEAKNESS" of the alien invaders, and even though the film ends abruptly with a shot of Emily Blunt's Evelyn Abbott taking aim at their foes, it's also fairly final. We know what happens next. She saves the remaining members of her family. (RIP to Krasinski's Lee Abbott.)
But A Quiet Place was a hit, and a sequel went into development. Now, A Quiet Place Part II has arrived, and this time there's no mistaking that Krasinski and company are plotting an even bigger franchise. This time the sudden ending certainly implies there's a Part III on the horizon.
Krasinski leaves the Abbott family separated at the end of this second installment. Regan (Millicent Simmonds) has sought out a community of survivors living on an island with the aid of Cillian Murphy's Emmett, the widower who reluctantly allows the Abbotts to seek shelter alongside him. The islanders have been broadcasting Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea" from an abandoned radio station as a kind of signal; Regan figures that if she can broadcast the noise from her hearing aid that disables the monsters, she can save a whole lot more people.
Meanwhile, her brother Marcus (Noah Jupe) and her mother Evelyn have been fending off an attack on the warehouse caused by Marcus's irresponsible curiosity. When Evelyn is out gathering supplies, he goes poking around, comes across the skeleton of Emmett's dead wife, makes a lot of noise, and triggers the beasties. To make matters worse, he accidentally locks himself and his infant brother in an airtight furnace trying to escape. Luckily, his mother comes to their aid before they both suffocate, but the creatures are relentless.
That's where Regan—from far away–comes in. While she and Emmett fend off one of their own, one they accidentally brought to a safe community, she enacts her plan. Marcus, listening to the radio, realizes what she has done when the piercing noise hits and uses that to his advantage. Both kids defeat their respective alien menaces.
A Quiet Place Part II spends a lot of time expanding the world of this dystopia. It opens with a flashback to the day the chaos arrived, paints a more detailed picture of the feral zombie-like humans warped by the incident, and offers a sign of life untouched by this crisis. Turns out the monsters can't swim. (They can travel by boat, which is how they landed on the tranquil spot of land after Regan and Emmett.) All this information is useful for broadening the Quiet Place universe, and Krasinski and Paramount already have plans to do that. In November, Deadline reported that Midnight Special director Jeff Nichols is writing and directing another Quiet Place movie that may be a direct sequel to Part II and may be a whole other thing.
But regardless of the direction Nichols takes the world, Krasinski's conclusion indicates that we have likely not seen the last of the Abbotts. Whereas in the first movie the cut to black felt like a daring choice, here, it feels like the set up for more. The Abbotts are separated. How will Regan and the injured Emmett get back to Marcus, Evelyn, and the baby? How will Regan's daring deed affect others? Are the people of that island pissed that Regan and Emmett destroyed their sanctuary? Whether you're exhausted by the silence—and the fact that A Quiet Place Part II is mostly a series of tense set-pieces—or not, there's clearly more in store.