Here's how Bird Box Barcelona connects to the first movie
Bird Box Barcelona is now out on Netflix, but if you didn't know about the movie until it popped up on your home screen, there might be some confusion about whether it's the long-awaited Bird Box 2.
The new movie is not a direct sequel to 2018 hit Bird Box, which starred Sandra Bullock and was seen by basically every Netflix user over that year's festive season.
Instead, Bird Box Barcelona is a largely Spanish-language spin-off movie that focuses on new characters dealing with the same threat. Bullock's Malorie doesn't return in the new movie for reasons that will become clear as we explain the new movie's timeline.
Bird Box timeline explained
If you need reminding, the first Bird Box movie was split across two timelines. It started five years after the creatures first attacked, decimating the world's population, as Malorie was trying to get her two children to safety.
The movie flicked between this present timeline and five years earlier when Malorie attempted to survive the apocalypse with a group of people. Eventually, all of them died and it was just her, Tom (Trevante Rhodes) and the two children, one of them Malorie's and the other Olympia's (Danielle Macdonald), who died shortly after giving birth.
Tom then sacrificed himself to save Malorie and the children, and Malorie got them safely to a community at a former school for the blind. That was where we left them, but if you thought Bird Box Barcelona would pick up this thread, it doesn't.
Instead, Bird Box Barcelona is taking place simultaneously to the past timeline in the original movie.
The spin-off movie opens nine months after the initial attacks and follows Sebastián (Mario Casas) and his daughter Anna (Alejandra Howard) as they attempt to find safety in Barcelona. (It sounds exactly like the first movie, but trust us when we say something happens that means it's not.)
As in the first movie, Bird Box Barcelona cuts between this present timeline and nine months earlier, filling in the gaps as to how Sebastián and Anna got to where they are. But it ends in this present timeline without a time jump into the future.
It means that Bird Box Barcelona finishes more than four years before Malorie and her children make it to the community at the end of Bird Box. It's why Malorie isn't in the new movie as she's dealing with the same creature-related issues at the same time that Sebastián and Anna are.
The movie ends with a tease of more to come and there are other local language spin-offs planned for the Bird Box universe. Whether any of them will finally tell the rest of Malorie's story remains to be seen though.
Bird Box and Bird Box Barcelona are available to watch now on Netflix.
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