JJ Abrams is good at keeping secrets. He managed to keep nearly everything about Cloverfield quiet until almost the day of release (and even at that point wouldn’t release images of the creature), and if reports are to be believed, he’s done it again. With Cloverfield, the first thing monearly anyone heard anything about it was a in a surprise trailer before Transformers (which didn’t reveal too much). Now it appears in the US this Friday, they’re getting a teaser for a new mysterious Abrams project called Super 8.
So what is this film? Well, there’s no definite info yet, although according to Hitfix, it’s rumoured to be a Cloverfield sequel. However quite where these rumours comes from is anyone’s guess. With the secrecy surrounding the film that would make sense, as would the fact that Super 8 sounds like a code title (Cloverfield was supposedly a code title as well, but that’s what they eventually released it as). And if it is related to Cloverfield, some have suggested it could be a prequel, with Super 8 referring to the home movies people had before video (Head over to Vulture for some potentially spoiler-ific info about this possibility).
There’s also the possibility that it could the a film previously rumoured to be called 500 Rads, which Abrams is producing and created the story for. That is said to be a kind of zombie story. However sources say it’s definitely not the project rumoured last week that would see Abrams teaming with Spielberg.
However at the moment no one really knows anything definite, and Super 8 could be something we haven’t even heard rumours about before. The trailer is said to be arriving alongside prints of Iron 2 at US cinemas, locked in a canister that’s on an electronic timer, so projectionists can’t open it until Thursday afternoon and spoil the surprise. Presumably by Friday we’ll know a bit more about Super 8, following Iron Man 2 midnight screenings in the US, although if it’s anything like Cloverfield, expect a lot of questions to remain even after we’ve seen the trailer.