Ridley Scott is going to turn 89 years old later this year but is still as sharp as ever. He’s got a new movie, The Dog Stars, opening this week. He’ll follow that up with the pirate film Treasure Island, starring Hugh Jackman, and has several other films he could tackle after that. One of which is a return to the world of Alien.
Scott, who directed the original 1979 Alien, returned to that world with 2012’s Prometheus and followed that film up in 2017 with Alien: Covenant. Both took the franchise in some bold new directions, with Covenant ending on something of a cliffhanger. It wasn’t the box office smash it was intended to be, but it did okay, and Scott is still working on a sequel.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Scott says the idea would feature David, Michael Fassbender’s character from the previous two films, creating a “brave new world for himself” as a way to explore malfunctioning AI. “AIs can go off,” Scott said. “And if they do, it’s like a bomb.”
That does seem to be a logical place for the story to go. In Covenant, Fassbender played two roles: the terrifying David from Prometheus and a newer, more logical version of the android, named Walter. By the end of the film, David had basically killed everybody, pretended to be Walter to gain the trust of the last few survivors, and then tried to infect them with Xenomorphs. The movie isn’t great, but you definitely end it wondering, “What the hell is David going to do next?”
Scott has been talking about the idea for a few years, too. “Covenant is the best one [for a sequel] because it leaves the girl in the [cryo pod] and David has alien eggs and 2,000 colonists hanging around. It’s a perfect beginning,” he said back in 2024.
And yet, you have to imagine the odds of this film happening aren’t great. The earliest Scott could make it would be when he was in his early 90s, which isn’t impossible, but seems improbable. There are also multiple other storylines in the Alien franchise playing out from other teams, including FX’s Alien: Earth and a potential follow-up to Alien: Romulus. So that might be just a little too much Alien for Hollywood to handle.
But if anyone can do it, it would be Ridley Scott. And despite his last two Alien films failing to connect, we’d be there in a heartbeat.
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