Damon Lindelof talks where the Alien series could go after Covenant

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

**POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR ALIEN: COVENANT**

Upon the release of ALIEN: COVENANT we learned that Ridley Scott intends to do several more movies in the ALIEN saga, leading many to wonder how many times you can have people running away from murderous creatures in space. But according to PROMETHEUS writer Damon Lindelof, Scott has lots of plans for the franchise that COVENANT only touched the surface of.

While speaking with Collider Lindelof spoke discreetly about the different places he wanted to take the characters after PROMETHEUS, hinting that the planet we saw in COVENANT might not be where Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and David (Michael Fassbender) were originally heading:

I think that one of the conversations that we had at the end of Prometheus is, Shaw and David have basically locked in on the coordinates of the planet where the Engineers came from. What does that place look like? Ridley called it ‘Paradise’. What happens when they land on that planet? It doesn’t feel like they’ve gotten there yet in Covenant, Covenant felt like it maybe was a detour prior to them arriving at the place of origin so I don’t want to spoil any place that he might still be wanting to go, but the conversations that he and I had about where the story goes next were largely about the place where the Engineers were from and less the events of Covenant.

He went on to say Scott wanted these new movies to focus on "three generations of creation," and the search for God, working on themes from previous ALIEN movies and BLADE RUNNER. We have yet to see that journey completed, with the events of COVENANT acting as, as Lindelof said, a "detour" between where David and Shaw left in PROMETHEUS and the end point this search for God was taking them. But what did Lindelof ultimately think of COVENANT, which was written by John Logan and Dante Harper:

I can’t respond to Covenant along the lines of ‘I like it’, ‘I don’t like it’, ‘It’s good’ or ‘It’s bad’ because of my relationship to that material. That said, anytime I go to a movie I’m going to the movie because I want to like it and I was able to do that with Covenant. I really wanted to like it and therefore I was able to like it. I thought that Fassbender’s performance was off the hook. I love Ridley Scott’s filmmaking and there’s some incredibly beautiful filmmaking in that movie, so I programmed myself to enjoy the experience and I was successful in achieving my programming, I will say that.

Though Scott has big plans for the ALIEN franchise, current box office results of COVENANT could make that a more arduous goal to accomplish. Barley edging out GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY in its third week, COVENANT opened to $36 million and has since gone on to earn only $68 million and $175 million gloablly since its May 19 release. The movie still has to be released in China (June 16), but determining how it does there could likely spell if the series moves forward.

Scott clearly has a plan where to take the series, but he’s sure taking his time to get there. The director sees these movies as a great meditation on the idea of existence, but in my opinion COVENANT worked better as a sci-fi/horror/action flick than a meditative thought piece. Where Scott is going with these movies I have no idea, but based on the box office fans are losing patience. I’ll always be in line to buy a ticket, but I expect that line will grow shorter and shorter over the years.  

ALIEN: COVENANT is in theaters now.