It's no secret that Ridley Scott wants to keep cranking out the ALIEN sequels and it seems that production on the next film in the franchise after ALIEN: COVENANT is slated to get underway before too long. While speaking with IGN, Scott said that they're "writing a sequel now, as we speak," and that he'll be "filming that within fourteen months." With the soon-to-be-released ALIEN: COVENANT already receiving some fairly decent reviews, including one from our own Editor-in-Chief Paul Shirey, I'd imagine that audiences will still be hungry for more ALIEN movies.
Ridley Scott has previously mentioned that he has plans for several more ALIEN movies before finally connecting with the 1979 original, but for those of you looking forward to Neill Blomkamp's much-anticipated ALIEN sequel which would have seen Sigourney Weaver return to the franchise, Scott once again explained why that project is dead in the water.
They wanted to do Alien, er, Awakening – Neill Blomkamp. I said fine. I was going to be the producer. If I could have, I would have. Except I do question – why have both [Blomkamp's Alien and Scott's Alien] out there? It seems like shooting your big toe off – it doesn't make sense. But they didn't go forward with it, Fox, so I just kind of kept out of it. I mean, I'd literally ignited this thing to bring it off the ground again, because it was lying there dormant on a shelf. I had this thing to bring it back up – but here we are.
Although it's hard to deny that PROMETHEUS has certain faults, I still consider myself a big fan of the film. Reviews for ALIEN: COVENANT mostly seem to agree that the film does offer an improvement over PROMETHEUS, but that it isn't entirely devoid of its own problems. While that's not quite the "by golly, this time he did it!" which I was hoping for, I still can't wait to see what mysteries of the ALIEN franchise Ridley Scott will unravel this time.
The official synopsis for ALIEN: COVENANT:
Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created in ALIEN with ALIEN: COVENANT, the second chapter in a prequel trilogy that began with PROMETHEUS — and connects directly to Scott’s 1979 seminal work of science fiction. Bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, the crew of the colony ship Covenant discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world — whose sole inhabitant is the "synthetic" David (Michael Fassbender), survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.
ALIEN: COVENANT will burst into theates on May 19th.