Neill Blomkamp Might Be Planning More Than One Alien Movie
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Between Chappie opening this weekend (though to less than enthusiastic reviews and soft box office) and all the talk of his upcoming Alien movie, Neill Blomkamp has been all over the place (he’s even talked about the possibility of a sequel to his debut feature, District 9). Every time he sits down to talk about Chappie, Alien pops up and steals the spotlight, but in one recent interview he indicated that there could be more than just the one film.
Talking to Empire, the South African director discussed the genesis of his Alien idea, how much he wanted to work in the franchise, and how Sigourney Weaver played into the process. He said:
If you go back even three or four years, I’ve wanted to make a film in that genre, in that franchise. I’d come up with an idea, and when I met Sigourney (Weaver) on the set of Chappie, I presumed that she would never want to play Ripley again. Rightly or wrongly, I had that in my head. I also didn’t know where you could go with her, given Alien 3 and 4.
We’ll get back to some of the things he said there in a moment, but he continued:
So when I started speaking to her, I just wanted to know more about the process of making the first two films. The first two are the ones that I care about. Then I started to realize there was a whole film – at least a film, if not more – that still contained Ripley, which I was really surprised by.
The phrase “at least a film, if not more” is what really sticks out. It’s possible it is just an offhand remark in an interview, but it raises some interesting questions. Primarily, does this mean that Blomkamp has an idea beyond just a single film? Does he intend to, or at least want to, make more? Of course, he could just mean that there is room for more than one movie, if someone wants to make one, but it is something to consider.
There’s also been a lot of talk that Blomkamp’s Alien could disregard the events of Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, especially because his concept art features Michael Biehn’s Corporal Dwayne Hicks, though he dies early on in the third film. And what Blomkamp says here doesn’t really assuage those concerns.
Between both of his statements, is it just me or does it sound more and more like this new film is set between Aliens and Alien 3? That’s the only way it seems to make sense. It’s possible that Ripley, Hicks, and Newt could wake up from hypersleep, have a Xenomorph battling adventure, and get back in their pods where we first see them at the beginning of Alien 3. That might be a stretch, but stranger things have happened. I guess it could also involve clones in some capacity, as we’ve already seen that in the franchise.
Basically, this leaves us with even more questions without answers. We’re developing quite a list at this point. We don’t know how Blomkamp plans to fit his film into the timeline, all we can do is speculate, just like we won’t know if he plans to make more than one movie for quite a while.
