As far as breakout features go, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 was a hell of a way to introduce himself to the world. The $30 million sci-fi scored widespread critical acclaim, hauled in $210 million at the box office, and landed four Academy Award nominations, including a pair for the filmmaker in the Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay categories.
Since then, he’s struggled to recapture that early momentum, with Elysium and Chappie rehashing many of the same ideas, only to suffer from the law of diminishing returns. His planned detour into franchise fare ended up with his Alien movie and RoboCop Returns both being abandoned, although the latter remains in development with another director.
Ridley Scott went on to helm Prometheus and Alien: Covenant instead, and the veteran filmmaker is now collaborating with Legion and Fargo creator Noah Hawley to bring an episodic Alien series to television. In a new interview, Blomkamp was asked if his direct sequel to James Cameron’s 1986 classic would ever happen, and he didn’t sound too confident in either the project being resurrected, nor the studio system as a whole.
“No, would be my guess. I would say nothing will come out. But, who knows? At this present moment, I would say it’s just dead. I think the answer would be a mixture of both things, meaning it has turned me off and I am weary of huge IP that’s owned and controlled by corporate interests, but I simultaneously, if some awesome studio came to me some awesome piece of existing IP, I would be a fool to not look at what, at least, it was. It’s like, going in weary would be the way that I would look at it. My instinct is to just keep working on my own stuff, basically, but if someone came to me with something awesome, I would definitely look at it.”
Blomkamp is returning to one of his own wells after District 10 was confirmed to be in active development earlier this year. He’s keeping himself busy enough, with original horror Demonic coming to theaters and VOD this coming Friday, although it currently holds the unwanted distinction of a 0% Rotten Tomatoes score with ten reviews and counting in the bag.
Sci-fi action thriller Inferno with Taylor Kitsch is also in the works, while he’s got his experimental Oats Studios to keep him occupied, so he’s not going to lose any sleep over the demise of Alien 5.