Alien 5: Neill Blomkamp confirms he won’t return to the project

If you’re a fan of the Alien franchise who has been holding on to hope that Neill Blomkamp might someday get the chance to return to his scrapped Alien 5 idea, which was going to be a direct sequel to James Cameron’s Aliens and would have brought Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn back as Ripley and Hicks, it looks like it’s time to let go of that hope, because Blomkamp certainly has. In fact, Blomkamp – who has also been attached to direct Halo and RoboCop films at different points – says he has very little interest in working with any established intellectual properties in the future.

Speaking with The Guardian, Blomkamp suggested that Ridley Scott put the kibosh on the Aliens sequel because Scott didn’t like his movie Chappie. The Guardian points out that Scott had expressed interest in Blomkamp’s film after it was announced in February of 2015, but then Chappie was released in March and in October of that year Blomkamp’s Alien was cancelled. Blomkamp said,

It’s possible that Ridley watched Chappie and he was like, this guy can’t do Alien so let’s just go ahead and move on.”

Blomkamp never spoke to Scott after the cancellation because

There’s no coming back from that. I’m not gonna work on a film for two years and have the rug pulled out from underneath me and then go hang out and have beers. It’s exactly why I don’t want to do IP based on other people’s stuff ever again. … I’m sure they will make many films with that piece of IP, it just doesn’t include me.”

While Blomkamp took it hard when the project was scrapped, he also

felt bad for Sigourney because she was really into what I had brought forward. I felt like [for] audiences who loved Aliens, there was an opportunity to do one more film with Sigourney in a way that may have satiated what people were looking for and what I think I was looking for. What doesn’t make sense is that I feel like it’s what the audience wanted, so it’s strange because Fox would never really turn down money.”

When Blomkamp was developing his Alien 5, Scott was developing his own prequel trilogy, which began with Prometheus and continued with Alien: Covenant, then came to a screeching halt when Covenant was poorly received. Now Scott is on board to produce an Alien TV series that Noah Hawley is developing for the Hulu streaming service.

Blomkamp’s horror film Demonic is now in select theatres and can be rented on VOD, including through Amazon Prime.