Before Ridley Scott stormed back into the room to reclaim the Alien throne, filmmaker Neill Blomkamp had been developing his own Alien sequel that would have branched off from the ending of James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). The plan was to bring back both Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn), as well as Newt, and ignore all sequels following Cameron’s masterpiece. Fox took the bait and a screenplay was completed, but this was before Disney’s revitalized Star Wars blasted into theaters and inspired Scott to do the same with his Alien. Scott then cockblocked Blomkamp, deciding to turn his Prometheus sequel into Alien: Covenant, while simultaneously announcing plans for several sequels that would eventually bridge directly into his seminal 1979 Alien. There’s a bit of irony in what happened next… most of us mocked Blomkamp’s planned sequel as “fan service”, while Scott’s Covenant not only failed to please the majority of critics, but it also flopped at the box office. Now, not only is Disney in possession of Twentieth Century Fox, but reports came in just yesterday that the studio may have shut down pre-production on Scott’s planned Alien: Awakening.
Here’s what happened next… Blomkamp dropped fresh concept art from his defunct Alien 5. The timing isn’t coincidental as Blomkamp is saying, well, something. It’s possible that Blomkamp is throwing shade at Scott and Fox, telling them both, “Hey, look at what you passed up on.” It’s also possible that he’s re-opening his campaign to direct the next Alien film, if Fox were to decide to move away from Scott’s confused new series.There’s so much irony here in that we celebrated the return of Scott, but now are actually wondering if a Disney-backed PG-13 revival with Ripley and Hicks isn’t the way to go.
While John Squires and I are fans of what Scott’s been doing, we’d be hardpressed to say we wouldn’t love to see a fun, Ripley-themed sequel on the horizon. Who knows, it worked the first time Blomkamp shared some art, maybe history repeats itself?
