Paramount Pictures is planning a new installment in the Cloverfield series, with British-Iranian director Babak Anvari as director and Joe Barton as scriptwriter. To be titled Cloverfield 2, the film will be produced by franchise founder J. J. Abrams for Bad Robot, joined by Hannah Minghella and Jon Cohen.

The sci fi-horror franchise was launched in 2008 with Cloverfield, about a monster invasion of New York City. It was lauded for its skillful use of found footage.

That film was followed by 10 Cloverfield Lane in 2016 and by The Cloverfield Paradox two years later. No details have yet been released about the plot line of the new film.

Anvari’s first full-length film Under the Shadow (2016) garnered him an outstanding debut filmmaker award by BAFTA. His second offering, Wounds (2019) premiered at Sundance and Cannes. His most recent effort (and his first major studio film) was Netflix’s I Came By, released last month. It generated more than 30 million viewing hours in its first week.

When the first Cloverfield picture was released in 2008, producer Abrams explained to Time magazine why the filmmakers took the found-footage approach: “The movie is meant to be entertainment, to give people the sort of thrill I had as a kid watching monster movies. I hadn’t seen anything that felt that way for many years. I felt like there has to be a way to do a monster movie that’s updated and fresh.

So we came up with the Youtubification of things, the ubiquity of video cameras, cell phones with cameras. The age of self-documentation felt like a wonderful prism through which to look at the monster movie.”

The first installment in the series focused its lens on a group of young New Yorkers responding to an attack on the city by a giant monster, evoking comparisons with the old King Kong movie from the 1930s. Cloverfield was made for $25 million and grossed $172 million in global revenues.