While director Neill Blomkamp has seemingly made peace with his cancelled Alien 5, actress Sigourney Weaver has suggested that they could still make something special out of the project, and it seems that one of Blomkamp’s filmmaking forbearers in this sci-fi saga agrees.
For those who didn’t follow the news on this movie that never was, the District 9 helmsman was originally going to bring back Ellen Ripley for a timeline-altering reboot of the Alien series that would’ve disregarded all of the events that followed on from the franchise’s classic first two entries. Though Fox pulled the plug on the idea, Weaver told THR that both she and Aliens director James Cameron think it could’ve been great.
“We almost started to do it when I was working with James Cameron. But by the time we were put off by Fox, Neill had gotten so many jobs that we’d have to wait probably. I’m busy doing Avatar 4 and 5. I love working with Neill and I think he’d do a terrific job, and James Cameron really thinks it’s a great idea, so you never know. Right now, I think Neill’s got like three projects going at once.”
While the impending Fox-Disney merger could prove detrimental to the already-slim chance of Alien 5 getting made, Weaver isn’t wrong when she says you never know. After all, the new Halloween movie pulled a similar trick of scrapping the more divisive sequels from the continuity, and you can bet that the studios will have at least some interest in replicating the phenomenal box office success of that horror flick. Still, we wouldn’t get our hopes up quite yet, especially if Blomkamp is as busy as Weaver says he is.
But if Alien 5 isn’t likely to get off the ground anytime soon, at least we know that Cameron is currently working to redeem another of his old sci-fi properties, serving as producer on the sixth film of The Terminator series. Like Blomkamp’s feature, the movie will be a direct follow-up to the franchise’s first two installments, and if the approach pays off when the film hits theaters on November 1st, 2019, then perhaps the studios will have one more reason to give this new Alien idea a chance.