Talk on the Prometheus sequel, now officially titled Alien: Paradise Lost, continues to dominate the web thanks to Ridley Scott’s chatty disposition during press rounds for The Martian. From what he’s revealed thus far we know the film’s set to pick up with Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender’s characters venturing to the Engineers’ home planet, where they find our dastardly creators cooking up xenomorphs. And they won’t be alone.
“It’s going to be it’s own separate thing,” Scott told Awards Campaign when asked if the sequel would maintain the same visual style of Prometheus, “because they are going to the planet of the Engineers and they are going to see what happened there. It was a disaster. And they will be in that alien craft that takes them there, but with a new group that’s incoming, a new group of travelers in the beginning of the first act.”
A ‘new group’ in the Alien franchise, who visit a new planet that recently witnessed a disaster? That almost certainly guarantees that the first act is going to be a rather gory affair – but would it be an Alien movie without a whole lot of bloodshed?
Elsewhere, Scott offered more details concerning the time scale of his project, telling The Daily Beast that he’s planning a “six-month prep” prior to shooting the flick in Australia next March. That’s not the best bit. “And we have Neill Blomkamp’s Alien,” he adds, “which will be out in 2017. We just have the first [screenplay] draft in so far but it looks pretty good.”
Based on what Scott’s already let out of the bag – that his movie opens in 2017 followed by Blomkamp’s in 2018 – this could point to one of two outcomes: Paradise Lost will arrive earlier than expected, or we’ve got two Alien movies out in 2017. Either way, it’s an exciting time for a franchise that’s not seen so much action in nearly two decades.