The story of how Neill Blomkamp's upcoming ALIEN sequel came into being is pretty awesome. In his downtime, a filmmaking fanboy commissions concept art for a dream project sequel to a series he grew up a fan of, shares some of it online, and suddenly he has made a deal with the studio to turn his ideas into an actual movie.
I haven't been a big fan of Blomkamp's work to date, but I like that he has landed this ALIEN gig, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with it, hoping he'll make one of the better entries in the franchise.
Sigourney Weaver, who had a role in Blomkamp's film CHAPPIE and is featured in his ALIEN concept art as long-suffering heroine Ripley, certainly has a positive outlook on the project. Speaking to fans at the London Film and Comic-Con, Weaver said that she is
"…so excited about Neill — because Neill is like you guys! He broke the tapes of these movies when he was a kid, he watched them so much. I love the fact that’s Neill’s fulfilling his childhood dream of what he hopes will be the popcorn movie, the Alien popcorn movie that he wanted as a kid to see.”
This may be the most enthusiastic Weaver has been about the franchise since rumors of ALIEN VS. PREDATOR began circulating in the early '90s.
"I heard that Fox was gonna do Alien vs Predator, which really depressed me because I was very proud of the movies. I’ve nothing against building a movie on a video game, but at the time it was, as Jim Cameron said, I think publicly, ‘Why would you want to do that'? It’s like making Alien meets the Wolfman.”
As someone who was looking forward to seeing an ALIEN VS. PREDATOR movie, my response to "Why?" would be that it could have been incredibly cool… But that's not how I would describe either of the AVP movies we got.
Weaver also pointed out that 20th Century Fox focusing on getting AVP made deterred original ALIEN director Ridley Scott from the idea of making an ALIEN 5 in the early 2000s. Scott did eventually return to the ALIEN universe with PROMETHEUS in 2012, and is developing a sequel to that film. Weaver summed up the AVP films by saying,
“I think it caused more problems than it was worth.”
She may be right about that, but now that things are back on track for the Xenomorph series, might Ripley finally be getting a happy ending in Blomkamp's sequel? Weaver couldn't spoil it, of course, but she did admit,
“Well — it’s certainly something we’ve discussed. I agree, she’s had kind of a crap life. Many interruptions."
Production start dates have yet to be set for the ALIEN and PROMETHEUS movies in the works from Blomkamp and Scott.