Movies
Fede Alvarez Talks ‘Alien: Romulus’ Sequel Potential; “We Definitely Have Ideas”
The Alien franchise is back with director Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, which has scared up over $100 million at the worldwide box office in its first few days of release. Set between the events of Alien and Aliens, the new movie is the seventh installment in the main Alien series and the first to be released by Disney. Will it eventually spawn an eighth installment?
Chatting with The Hollywood Reporter this week, Fede Alvarez has revealed that he and co-writer Rodo Sayagues (Evil Dead) already have some early Alien: Romulus sequel ideas.
WARNING – THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS ALIEN: ROMULUS SPOILERS…
In Alien: Romulus, “While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.”
The sole survivors of the mission are Cailee Spaeny’s Rain Carradine and her android brother Andy (David Jonsson), who seek a better future on the planet Yvaga at the end of the film.
If Romulus does spawn a sequel, it sounds like we’ll be heading to Yvaga with the duo.
“Yes, I definitely can [pitch a sequel right now],” Alvarez explains. “We tend to do that naturally, not even thinking about sequels. For us, movies have not become franchises, tentpoles and sequels. This is a language that I’ve only learned in the last ten years of my life working [in Hollywood]. For me, it’s always been about story.”
He continues, “So, once we finished, we started thinking, ‘What do you think happens when or if they get to Yvaga? Is it going to be great? Or is it a terrible place?’ We tend to believe it’s probably a terrible place that they think is great and fantasize about, so we naturally started thinking about where it goes and what’s going to happen. And then, a few minutes in, we go, ‘Oh, that sounds like a sequel.’ But we really try to think about it more in terms of story and if it needs another chapter and whether people want to know what happens next.”
“So we’ll wait to see what people think and if people ask for it,” Alvarez adds. “My philosophy is that you should never make [a sequel] in two years. You’ve got to get away. You’ve got to get the audience to really want it. If you think about Alien and Aliens, there’s seven years between them. But we definitely have ideas about where it should go.”
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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