As we all know by now Disney recently acquired Fox – including the ALIEN series. While most of us have been scared that Disney would let the franchise fall by the wayside, today we have word via Ridley Scott himself that there are discussions for future installments in the works.
Scott says:
You get to the point when you say, ‘Okay, it's dead in the water. I think Alien vs. Predator was a daft idea. And I'm not sure it did very well or not, I don't know. But it somehow brought down the beast. And I said to them, ‘Listen, you can resurrect this, but we have to go back to scratch and go to a prequel, if you like.’ So we go to Prometheus, which was not bad actually. But you know, there's no alien in it, except the baby at the end that showed, itself, the possibility. I mean, it had the silhouette of an alien, right? The alien [origin concept] is uniquely attached to Mother Nature. It simply comes off a wood beetle that will lay eggs inside some unsuspecting insect. And in so doing, the form of the egg will become the host for this new creature. That's hideous. But that was what it was. And you can't keep repeating that because the joke gets boring.
Scott uses STAR TREK as a comparison.
So here we are, 50 years later, God bless them, they’ve kept [Star Trek] alive and kept going through its evolution. But it's harder to keep the beast going for that long. I think it’s just tough. The joke wears out. Once you've seen it twice, three times, it’s no longer frightening.
He adds:
Go on, leave that behind, and see where it can evolve. So we're looking where we're going to evolve.
In the film that birthed the wildly successful ALIEN franchise:
The crew of the deep space tug Nostromo awakens from stasis during a voyage home to Earth when their ship’s computer detects what is believed to be an alien distress signal coming from the desolate nearby moon, LV-426. While investigating, one of the crew, Kane, is attacked by an alien creature that latches to his face and he is rushed back to the Nostromo to receive medical treatment. Ripley, the ship’s warrant officer, advises against Kane’s return due to quarantine regulations – but her orders are ignored by Ash, bringing the Nostromo under threat from a mysterious, extraterrestrial apex predator with violent and lethal survival instincts.
ALIEN was directed by Scott from a screenplay co-written by Dan O'Bannon (THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD). It starred Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Yaphet Kotto. The ALIEN 40th Anniversary 4K ULTRA HD & Blu-ray hit back in April. You can snag a copy over on Amazon RIGHT HERE.