Last month, Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium) shared some concept art that he’d commissioned for an Alien film that he was quietly developing, which included shots of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Hicks (Michael Biehn) – the latter of whom (rather disappointingly) never managed to make it to the opening scene of Alien 3 alive.
Little explanation for the images was offered, save for the fact that he’d been working on the project without rights holders Fox, but now the filmmaker has offered up a few details during an interview with Uproxx about his latest movie Chappie.
“Basically, what happened was, when Chappie got heavily into post-production, I could take my foot off the gas a bit. I was thinking about what I wanted to do next and I’ve been wanting to make an Alien film for like years and years. Speaking to Sigourney Weaver, when we were doing Chappie, she set off a bunch of thoughts in my head — I had come up with an idea that didn’t have Sigourney, it was a different idea. But I spent all of the shooting time with her, it was like, holy shit, that could actually be really interesting. When I came back to Vancouver, I had an entire year to work on Chappie. And when I wasn’t needed in the edit, I could think about Alien. So, I basically developed an entire movie and I did all of this artwork as well.”
So, might it ever see the light of day? Well, possibly…
“If it’s going to happen, it has to be on my terms. So, I came up with it and I’m bringing this to you. It’s not like, “Would you like to do Spider-Man 36?” I still love it, I love the idea of the movie and I produced way more art than I put out. It was a whole story. Then I just wasn’t sure if I was going to do another film, like, at all… There’s a high possibility, a high degree of chance that it happens that I go back and try to get Alien made. [Fox] is not the problem, actually. Me. I’m the problem. Fox, they would make it. Like, tomorrow. They would make it.”
Would you like to see Blomkamp turning his hand to the Alien franchise? Let us know your thoughts…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszH_jfuJoo8HCG1-lGjvfH2F&v=lXOAy1VNGBA&feature=player_embedded
Originally published February 11, 2015. Updated January 18, 2020.
