Franchise Guide · Anthology Horror

Cloverfield Movies in Order

Three films that share a name and almost nothing else. What connects them, what does not, and why a bunker thriller with no monster in it ended up in a monster movie franchise.

WhatScares · August 2026 · Runtimes, directors and IMDb scores from IMDb's published datasets

Cloverfield is an anthology, not a trilogy. The three released films have no shared characters and no continuing plot — each was made as its own thing and joined the series afterwards. That is the single most useful fact about watching them.

Every film, in release order

  1. 01

    Cloverfield 2008

    Dir. Matt Reeves · 85 min · IMDb 7 (447,326 votes)

    The found-footage monster attack on Manhattan, shot as one long camcorder tape.

    WhatScares 4/5 jumps 2/5 gore 3/5 dread How scary is it →
  2. 02

    10 Cloverfield Lane 2016

    Dir. Dan Trachtenberg · 103 min · IMDb 7.2 (388,858 votes)

    Three people in a bunker, and the best-reviewed film in the series. Started life as an unrelated spec script called The Cellar.

    WhatScares 3/5 jumps 2/5 gore 4/5 dread How scary is it →
  3. 03

    The Cloverfield Paradox 2018

    Dir. Julius Onah · 102 min · IMDb 5.5 (122,454 votes)

    A space-station film, formerly God Particle, dropped on Netflix the night of the Super Bowl with no warning. It offers an in-universe reason the other films happen.

    Not in our catalog yet — we have not scored this one.
What the red-edged entries mean. 2 of these 3 films are in the WhatScares catalog, scored separately for jump scares, gore and dread. The rest are listed with their IMDb figures only. We would rather say we have not rated a film than invent a number for it — our scores go into structured data that search engines republish, so a guess would be a claim.

Story order

Because nothing carries over between them, there is no story order to get wrong. Release order is the standard answer, and the only sequencing that matters is this:

  1. Cloverfield — watch first — it is the one the others are named after
  2. 10 Cloverfield Lane — the strongest film, and completely standalone
  3. The Cloverfield Paradox — last, because its explanation only lands if you have seen the others

If you only watch one, make it 10 Cloverfield Lane. It needs no setup at all, and it is the highest-rated of the three.

Questions people actually ask

How many Cloverfield movies are there?
Three have been released: Cloverfield (2008), 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) and The Cloverfield Paradox (2018).
Is 10 Cloverfield Lane related to Cloverfield?
Only loosely. It shares no characters or plot with the 2008 film. It was written as a standalone thriller called The Cellar and brought into the Cloverfield series during production, which is why it feels like a different kind of film — it is one.
Why is it called Cloverfield?
Cloverfield was the production code name, taken from Cloverfield Boulevard near Bad Robot’s offices in Santa Monica. It was never meant to be the release title; it stuck because the secrecy campaign had already made the word mean something.
Do I need to watch them in order?
No. Each film stands alone. Release order is still the best default, because The Cloverfield Paradox is built to reframe the other two and does very little on its own.
Which Cloverfield movie is the scariest?
Of the two we have scored, the 2008 original is the more startling — 4 out of 5 for jump scares against 3 for 10 Cloverfield Lane. 10 Cloverfield Lane is the more sustained dread, 4 out of 5. Neither is especially gory. The Cloverfield Paradox is not in our catalog yet.

Every film we rate gets three scores, not one. Jump scares, gore and dread are different things, and a film can be brutal on one and harmless on the other two. That is the whole idea behind WhatScares.

Search 323 films by what scares you The scariest movies, by the numbers →