How to Watch All the Cloverfield Movies, In Order
With three unique and wildly different movies already out there, Cloverfield has made its name as one of the most unorthodox and surprising franchises we’ve seen this century.
Released over ten years, the original trilogy (if you can even call it that) went from shaky handheld camera images in a party in Brooklyn, to a prepper’s bunker in Louisiana, to an adventure in outer space—all while delivering enough twisty thrills and creepy, quadrupedal Kaiju to keep the series feeling like a connected whole.
With news of a fourth instalment in the series again doing the rounds – plus, the intrigue around a possible connection between The End of Oak Street and the franchise – there’s probably never been a better time to revisit the original trilogy. In the list below, you’ll find every movie in the Cloverfield franchise so far, listed by order of release date.
Read on to discover more about them and use the guide below to find them on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
Released in 2008, Cloverfield entered our cinemagoing psyche with one of the best viral marketing campaigns of all time. First, a teaser trailer with no title attached that ended with Lady Liberty’s head rolling down a street. Next, a series of cryptic websites, leading some online speculators to believe that the movie was a spin-off from producer J.J. Abrams’ Lost, which had then just finished its third season with one of TV’s greatest ever cliffhangers.
In the end, the movie turned out to be very much its own thing: a brilliant, found-footage, horror-monster movie mashup (think Godzilla meets Chronicle) that, despite being written by Drew Goddard and directed by Matt Reeves, still felt very much a part of Abrams’ house of sci-fi wonders.
The same could be said for 10 Cloverfield Lane, a sequel that was even more in the sci-fi lineage of directors like Abrams (especially Super 8) and Spielberg (Close Encounters) than the first instalment. And similar to that earlier movie, Lane only revealed itself to audiences gradually—the title, for one, was announced only a mere two months before the movie was released.
Indeed, 10 Cloverfield Lane begins with scenes of relatively normal stuff before revealing that the protagonist, Michelle (Mary Elisabeth Winstead), has been locked in a bunker with a creepy older man (John Goodman) who claims to have saved her life. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg (Predator: Badlands) from a script co-written by Damien Chazelle (Whiplash), the movie works great because the viewer already knows that alien creatures are terrorising the world outside. The question is whether Michelle will work that out before it’s too late.
The most recent Cloverfield movie was released with similar theatrics to the first two instalments: fans were aware that a new Cloverfield movie was on the way, but nobody expected the first trailer to drop during the Super Bowl in February 2018 or, even more shockingly, that the film would land on Netflix right after the game finished.
Unfortunately for fans of the series, The Cloverfield Paradox turned out to be the weakest of the three—an interesting story set on board a space station that Abrams messily retrofitted to act as a kind of origin for the Cloverfield universe. That said, there’s no arguing with the quality of the cast, which includes fan favourites like Daniel Brühl (Rush) and Elizabeth Debicki (Widows)—and hey, if you’re on board with the franchise to this point, it’s still worth seeing.
Naturally, any addition to the Cloverfield franchise will be shrouded in mystery—and in truth, we wouldn’t want it any other way. At the time of writing, however, it appears that a fourth Cloverfield movie is in the works— with Joe Barton (Black Doves) writing the script and Babak Anvari (I Came By) confirmed to direct.
It’s also been suggested that this fourth instalment will be a direct sequel to the first movie—although it apparently won’t be presented in the same found footage style. Other than that, we will have to wait and see. But given that those names were announced as far back as 2022, we might not have to for much longer.
