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If any science-fiction saga looked beyond recovery, it was the Alien franchise. For the 38 years that followed James Cameron’s Aliens, film-makers contrived to find every imaginable way of not making a good Alien film. They tried killing everyone the audience cared about before the opening credits, marooning Sigourney Weaver on a planet populated entirely by bald British character actors, cloning Ripley, pitting xenomorphs against Predators, and sending scientists across the universe to ask an enormous, hairless space bodybuilder why he made them. They even ponied up the thick end of $100m for a film in which Michael Fassbender teaches himself to play the flute.
And then in 2024, we got Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, in which actual xenomorphs chase actual human beings down actual corridors for the clearly defined purposes of either killing them or putting smaller xenomorphs inside them. Better still, a year later we got Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth, which reminded us that giant, murderous space insects are in fact less awful than tech trillionaires.
Life was good, but as long-term fans of the franchise, we ought to have known it wouldn’t last. This week, Ridley Scott – who kicked off the entire saga with 1979’s seminal Alien but has yet to make a good sequel or prequel to it – revealed that he is developing a follow-up to his much-maligned 2017 film Alien: Covenant. It would see the return of Fassbender’s David, the murderous android who may or may not have started the ball rolling towards the horrors that eventually became the xenomorphs with his genetic tinkering, and who was last seen steering a colony ship packed with sleeping settlers and human embryos into the great cosmic beyond. According to the 88-year-old film-maker, the new film will detail how David creates, in Scott’s own words, “a brave new world for himself”. Further plot details remain undisclosed, but the British director did helpfully observe that AIs “can go off” and, when they do, are “like a bomb”.
It’s not the first time Scott has talked up sequels to Covenant. During the publicity run for the film, he said a follow-up was already being written and that he would start shooting within 14 months. He also suggested he could make as many as six more Alien prequels, with the series eventually leading up to the original Alien. Eight years and no prequels later, Scott announced that he had “done enough” with the franchise and merely hoped it would continue without him. Now he appears to have reverted to an earlier mode.
Part of the issue is that, alongside season two of Alien: Earth, a sequel to Romulus is already in development. Álvarez and his co-writer Rodo Sayagues have finished the script for the film, which Álvarez will produce (alongside Scott), while another director takes over. That leaves Alien pursuing three different futures at once: Hawley’s corporate small-screen nightmare, the stripped-back survival horror of Romulus, and Scott’s portentous, quasi-theological android opera. Of these three approaches, only one has already been tried twice, to diminishing enthusiasm. Yet Scott apparently remains determined to finish answering questions the franchise is now thriving without.
To be fair, Fassbender’s David is one of Alien’s most intriguing antagonists, but he has been the principal attraction in two films that made little case for a third. If we really need to see him again, a high-end television offshoot would surely offer enough room to complete his story. Eight hours ought to be enough for even David to finish explaining himself, and most Alien fans would watch to the end. But another movie in which David quotes poetry and perfects his egg collection while yet another crew of unwitting space colonists inspect it at suicidally close range? That is somewhat more doubtful. There are only so many times you can explain a nightmare before abject terror turns to outright tedium. Give David his limited series, then let the xenomorphs return to the honest work of killing supporting actors in ventilation shafts. In space, nobody needs to hear your origin story.
English (US) ·