After taking the franchise back to its xenomorph roots with Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott has now revealed to Entertainment Weekly that – as he attempted to do with Prometheus, to mixed results – that his planned sequels will “drift away from the alien stuff.”
“We are [going to make another], we are,” said Scott, who had originally said that he intended to make four more Alien movies after Covenant, before the most recent instalment underwhelmed at the box office. “I think what we have to do is gradually drift away from the alien stuff. People say, ‘You need more alien, you need more face pulling, need more chest bursting,’ so I put a lot of that in Covenant and it fitted nicely. But I think if you go again you need to start finding another solution that’s more interesting. I think AI is becoming much more dangerous and therefore more interesting.”
Scott, who is currently putting the finishing touches to his latest film All the Money in the World, went on to discuss a Facebook AI experiment from last year, stating that: “They put two AIs together and they were communing. It already invented a fucking language! And they couldn’t decipher what the language was so they had to switch them off. What was said and where’s it gone? They could have already implemented something we don’t know.”
This isn’t the first time that Scott has talked about his plans to further focus on A.I. in the sequels, but if does beg the question whether fans of the Alien franchise will have any interest in seeing Alien movies that don’t actually feature much in the way of aliens. What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments below…
Originally published December 11, 2017. Updated January 25, 2020.
