Neill Blomkamp announces District 10 screenplay is in the works

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Director Neill Blomkamp took to Twitter this morning to give his fans a very early surprise to wake up to. Blomkamp announced that he and his writing partners Sharlto Copley and Terri Tatchell are in the process of writing the screenplay for District 10, the highly-anticipated sequel to his critical and box office hit, District 9.

That is all that Blomkamp left us with but it's surely enough to generate enough buzz with the fandom. District 9 was released in 2009 and pretty much shocked everyone with not only its box office performance, which was a robust $211 million worldwide but also by the fact that the film turned into a surprise Oscar player. District 9 received four Academy Award nominations, including best picture and original screenplay for Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, a rare feat for a science fiction action movie. The movie's box office total also made it the largest-ever for a South African film.

District 9 is partially presented in a found footage format by featuring fictional interviews, news footage, and video from surveillance cameras to tell its story. The film begins in an alternate 1982 when an alien spaceship appears over Johannesburg, South Africa. When a population of sick and malnourished insectoid aliens is discovered on the ship, the South African government confines them to an internment camp called District 9. Twenty years later, during the government's relocation of the aliens to another camp, one of the confined aliens named Christopher Johnson, who is about to try to escape from Earth with his son and return home, crosses paths with a bureaucrat leading the relocation named Wikus van der Merwe.

Rumors of a sequel to District 9 have been swirling for quite some time and Blomkamp even took to Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) in 2017 to let fans know that a sequel would happen but he also took that moment to explain why it hadn't been announced just yet:

"Ok, so with ‘District 10’ the basic answer is yes. I want to go back to that world and tell rest of the story with Wikus and Christopher. The issue right now is that I have many other projects and ideas that I also want to work on and complete…..and most importantly, the exact right REASON to make District 10 needs be very clear. The first film was based so explicitly on real themes and topics from South Africa that effected [sic] me greatly growing up there, that we need to make sure the next film does not forget that."

Are YOU excited that District 10 is happening? What do YOU want to see in the sequel?