Since Ridley Scott started on the publicity tour for The Martian, we’ve learned a wealth of new information on the upcoming Prometheus sequel. Now brandishing the official title of Alien: Paradise Lost, the film is now closely connected to Scott’s original Alien series, and is expected to investigate the origins of those pesky xenomorphs before a further sequel will sync up to Alien with a bonus Ripley connection.
All in all, the past week has been an information dump of Alien proportions, and Scott continues to bait us with tiny tidbits of extra intel. In a new interview with Yahoo Movies, Scott discusses where the sequel is likely to take Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender’s survivors.
“Have you ever read Paradise Lost, by Milton? In a funny kind of way, it’s an interesting basis for the darkness of [Prometheus 2]. Where the good-looking guy, who is evil as s–t, gets all the girls and goes to the nightclubs. The other guy, who is not quite as good-looking, is boring as hell and stays home.
So in a funny kind of way, we used that as the basis for it, it’ll be Alien: Paradise Lost. Which is very spooky, because it continues after the last one, where Elizabeth Shaw [Noomi Rapace] says, “I wanna go where they came from.” And you’ve got Michael Fassbender in two parts, so she’ll slowly put him back together. They will go to the world of the Engineer… That’s where they’re going to go. They will find out who would design such an awful bio-mechanoid creature, like a massive piece of bacteria.”
In Prometheus, the black goo contained in the urns on the Derelict ship were positioned as ancestral versions of the iconic Alien egg/facehugger, so it’ll be interesting to discover how Scott plans to fast forward the evolution of the creature to the xenomorph in the next movie.
Shifting on to Blade Runner and its sequel — or should we say sequels? — Scott confirms that he’s going to get final cut on the Denis Villeneuve-directed follow-up to his 1982 original, and that he is more than happy to keep pushing on with further sequels after that:
Listen: Everyone else is, so why not? I love to work. The French say, “Work to live,” and I live to work. I’m very lucky to have a job that I adore. All my kids do the same thing. Some of it’s trying, but it’s like being in professional sport. It’s so competitive [that] you better keep bouncing the ball. You can’t rest.
He goes on to confirm that Harrison Ford is back as Deckard – and yes, he’s absolutely 100% a replicant – and Ryan Gosling is set to star alongside him before breaking down the logistics of how that might occur.
“It was 2017,” he says concerning the original, “so coming back it’ll be 2047, roughly. As young as you can play Ryan Gosling. He’s 34, but he looks 27 when he’s doing his push-ups. So maybe 2050.”
Alien: Paradise Lost starts shooting in February 2016 ahead of a May 2017 release date, with Blade Runner 2 eyeballing a summer 2016 production start. Tell us, which one of Ridley Scott’s next ventures are you most excited to see return to the big screen?