A Quiet Place is expanding its universe with an ambitious prequel.

A shocked woman covering her mouth with her hands and a worried-looking man standing on a New York street as flaming meteors rain down.

We’re about to discover how “the world went quiet” in A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel that depicts the sudden apocalypse on a much larger scale. With the critical and financial success of both A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II, it should come as no surprise that we’re getting more.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II

Following on from writing and directing the first two movies, John Krasinski cracked the basic story for Day One years ago and has since been working away on a script. After several delays, the movie was finally shot early last year, and Paramount Pictures has given it a summer 2024 release slot.

Although the movies largely feel like simple creature features and thrillers, A Quiet Place: Day One seems to be leaning more toward the alien invasion element. That’s why we thought it’d be a great idea to take stock of everything we know about A Quiet Place: Day One.

While you’re waiting for it to land, we recommend checking out our guides to the very best alien invasion movies and alien invasion games. And don’t forget that this summer, Alien: Romulus will take us to outer space. This is going to be a stellar year for fans of extraterrestrial scares.

A scared woman covering her mouth is flanked by two worried men on either side. It is dark and one of the men is holding a torch.

A Quiet Place: Day One will be released in the United States by Paramount Pictures on June 28, 2024. Most international territories, including the U.K. are thankfully getting it on the same date. This indicates that Paramount is pushing as hard as possible to make it one of the biggest movies of the summer.

The movie was originally set to release on March 31, 2023, and was later moved to September 22, 2023. After a creative/director shake-up and the usual production delays, the tentpole release was pushed to a more realistic 2024 slot.

A man holding a torch and a woman holding a cat are carefully walking through a dark room.

A Quiet Place: Day One’s plot is looking refreshingly straightforward, thankfully – a recurring problem in many modern sci-fi movies is that they’re too bloated, so this approach is great to see. Despite the change of scenery and the larger scale that comes with New York City, it’s been designed as an apocalyptic survival movie with horror and classic creature feature elements. So, essentially the same as the other two entries.

However, the big city setting offers a number of opportunities the two mainline movies didn’t have access to: big action set pieces (with the exception of that great flashback in Part II), more oppressive sequences inside buildings and underground, and more poor humans in extreme danger. Also, the main protagonist, a woman named Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), has a cat and we’re really worried about its ultimate fate, because how can you keep a cat quiet?

For those coming in fresh: A Quiet Place’s aliens, whose origins were kept somewhat mysterious in the first movie, are indeed aliens. The second installment confirms they literally fell from outer space, but the question of whether they came inside asteroids, spaceships, or another type of infested debris is still up in the air. Was their sudden arrival a planned invasion, or an unhappy accident?

Humankind was instantly screwed regardless, as the aliens’ ultra-developed hearing capabilities, strength, and speed caught humans by surprise, and any noisy location quickly went quiet. It’s also implied they crash-landed all over Earth and rapidly multiplied, but further details have yet to be revealed. We’re hoping Day One expands on what they are now that we know how they can be defeated.

Paramount has released two official railers for A Quiet Place: Day One so far, and we’re fully expecting the marketing campaign to ramp up in the coming weeks with spots and viral promotional materials.

The first trailer, which was more than enough to answer whether or not this prequel was really needed (the answer is yes), dropped on February 7, 2024.

The second trailer arrived on May 9 and is much meatier. It gives us an extended look at who the main characters are and delivers some rather tense and thrilling moments.

A Quiet Place: Day One’s cast is as lean as the core premise of these movies. However, the cast list certainly packs a punch and has only made us more excited to see where they’re taking this story.

Lupita Nyong’o (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) stars as Sam and is joined by Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things) as Eric, Alex Wolff (Oppenheimer) as Reuben, and Djimon Hounsou (Rebel Moon) as Henri, the good-hearted character he already played in A Quiet Place Part II, meaning he will make it out of this one alive.

Michael Sarnoski (Pig) landed in the director’s chair after Jeff Nichols (Midnight Special) dropped out due to creative differences. After Sarnoski’s arrival, he helped rewrite the story and characters together with John Krasinski.

Alongside John Krasinski, Michael Bay, Andrew Form, and Brad Fuller also remain on board as producers. The cinematography was handled by Pat Scola, who reunited with Sarnoski following their notable work together on Pig.

The biggest head-scratcher here is that we’ve yet to learn who will be scoring the movie, as Marco Beltrami (Terminator 3) – who worked on the music for the previous two A Quiet Place movies – seemingly isn’t back for this one.