Movies
New ‘Alien’ Is a Collaboration Between Sigourney Weaver and Neill Blomkamp!
The dance that is the next Alien has exploded into epic proportions as Elysium, District 9 and Chappie director Neill Blomkamp is teaming with Sigourney Weaver for the hotly anticipated sequel.
The two, after playing coy, are finally opening up to press during their tour of Chappie, in which the they both worked together for a second time.
EW chatted with both and learned that Blomkamp was inspired by Weaver’s ideas. For those of you paying attention, she’s always been extremely vocal about her desire to destroy the Xeno’s home planet.
“It did have to do with having Sigourney on ‘Chappie’. It’s just something that I’ve always wanted to one day be a part of. Those first two [‘Alien’] films are probably my favorite films ever made. I didn’t know if it would ever happen. I just always wanted to participate in it if I was able to.
Over the years, I came up with a story for a film in that universe that I wanted to make. And then when I talked to her about her experience making those films and what she thought about Ripley and everything else, it informed and changed the film I wanted to make into something different.
It just sort of stuck with me. A year later, when post-production was winding down on ‘Chappie’, I started fleshing out the idea for a film that would contain Sigourney. Fox never knew. I just worked on it when I could. Before I knew it, I had this really awesome film with a lot of artwork and a lot of backstory. And then I didn’t know whether I was going to make it or not. So I just kind of sat on it for a while.
Thanks to Fox giving Deadpool a go after test footage leaked, Blomkamp used grassroots to hype his vision that ultimately caught the attention of the studio, too.
Also, as a bonus, below is a video with the duo that has Weaver talking about her vision mentioned above, while Blomkamp calls it a Freudian nightmare.
Blomkamp also dropped this gem: “I want this film to feel like it is literally the genetic sibling of Aliens, so it’s Alien, Aliens and then this film.”
They both elude to this being the final story: “I would love to take Ripley out of, sort of, orbiting around outer space and give a proper finish to what was such an excellent story,” said Weaver. “So when somebody like Neill Blomkamp suddenly said, ‘Well, I’m interested in finishing the story,’ my little ears perked up.”
The bugs are finally going to get what’s been coming to them.
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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