A surprise Bad Robot trailer for a film called 10 Cloverfield Lane is running in front of Michael Bay's newly released 13 Hours. The clip features John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Gallagher, Jr. trapped in some kind of underground bunker, with Winstead and Gallagher seemingly being held against their will.  The title suggests that the upcoming movie has some sort of connection to 2008's Abrams-produced, found-footage monster movie Cloverfield — and the director confirms as much in a statement issued to Collider: "The idea came up a long time ago during production. We wanted to make it a blood relative of Cloverfield. The idea was developed over time. We wanted to hold back the title for as long as possible."  Previous reports indicated that Dan Trachtenberg, director of 10 Cloverfield Lane, had been working on a Bad Robot project called Valencia featuring this same cast. Winstead shared a few insights on Valencia back in March 2015, during an interview with Collider conducted when she was doing the press rounds for an indie called Faults.  "[Goodman's character] tells me that basically the world is over outside because there’s been a nuclear fall-out," she said at the time. "You don’t know who’s telling the truth or who to believe. There’s a lot of, who’s manipulating who, and all of that. Tonally, it’s very different [from Faults], but it has some of those same themes."  Cloverfield was the subject of a mysterious reveal campaign in the months leading to its 2008 release. In many ways, it was the project that established Abrams' notorious big-screen reputation for secrecy and misdirection. Cloverfield dramatizes an attack on New York City by a gigantic Godzilla-like monster — but it takes the unique approach of showing how the whole thing plays out at the ground level, as seen through the lens of one survivor group's camcorder.  10 Cloverfield Lane appears to take a more traditional approach, with staged shots captured by a camera that doesn't exist inside the movie's fiction. There's some suggestion that the story plays out either mostly or entirely inside the bunker, though that could easily be more misdirection.  This will be Trachtenberg's big debut as a feature film director after he made noise in 2011 with his excellent, video game-inspired short film Portal: No Escape. He's working with a screenplay from Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken and Damien Chazelle, all of whom are relative newcomers to Hollywood.  There's not much more to dig up on 10 Cloverfield Lane right now, but you can keep up with it on a very spare website that features a poster — bearing the tagline "Monsters come in many forms" — and little else. Look for the movie in theaters on Mar. 11, 2016.  Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
See the mysterious trailer for '10 Cloverfield Lane,' a film said to be a 'blood relative' to the J.J. Abrams-produced monster movie 'Cloverfield.'