Originally published July 12, 2017. Updated December 17, 2019.
It looks like Neill Blomkamp’s ill-fated Alien 5 didn’t always feature series mainstay Ellen Ripley. In a recent interview with Funhaus, the director reveals that an encounter with Sigourney Weaver herself changed his mind completely…
“I met Sigourney on Chappie and I had a different idea for an Alien film I wanted to make. So I had this idea for a story set in the world of those two first films that was not a continuation of James Cameron’s. It was just in the world of it and it had a totally different character that was the lead character. Because my assumption was that Sigourney would just never make another one. I told her about it on Chappie and she was like ‘No, no, no! I actually would make another one because I felt like Ripley’s story didn’t end correctly.’”
“So I went back to Vancouver and, while I was editing Chappie, I started to think about what I would do with Sigourney as basically a sequel to James Cameron’s film. I spent about a year working on it with only Sigourney knowing and I hired one really awesome concept artist. We put together essentially a script and all the artwork and that’s what I went to 20th Century Fox with. They seemed really into it and Ridley Scott came on as producer, and then it just unraveled.”
Now that Blomkamp’s Alien 5 is said to be “totally dead”, it may go down in history as one of cinema’s biggest “what if” projects. While Alien 3 does have its fans, the majority of people felt left down by the movie for many reasons. This movie looked to right a lot of those wrongs. In its place, you can check out Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant, and decide for yourself if it was the right movie to be made in place of Blomkamp’s.
SEE ALSO: Paradise Lost: The Troubled Production History of Neill Blomkamp’s Alien 5
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